Trust Management and Discovery of Cloud Services

Abstract

According to researchers at Berkeley et al. [10], trust and security are ranked as one of the top ten obstacles for the adoption of cloud computing. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) alone are inadequate to establish trust between cloud service consumers and providers because of its unclear and inconsistent clauses [66, 67]. For instance, in a recent survey, 46.6 % of consumers agree that SLA’s legal contents are unclear. Consumers’ feedback is a good source to assess the overall trustworthiness of cloud services. Several researchers have recognized the significance of trust management and proposed solutions to assess and manage trust based on feedbacks collected from participants. However, credibility-based trust management of cloud services raise privacy concerns because consumers can have dynamic interactions with cloud service providers and the trust management service which involve sensitive information. There are several cases of privacy breaches such as leaks of sensitive information (e.g., date of birth and address) or behavioral information (e.g., with whom the consumer interacted, the kind of cloud services the consumer showed interest, etc.). Undoubtedly, services which involves consumers’ data (e.g., interaction histories) should preserve the privacy.