CloudArmor: supporting reputation-based trust management for cloud services

Abstract

Trust management is one of the most challenging issues for the adoption and growth of cloud computing. The highly dynamic, distributed, and non-transparent nature of cloud services introduces several challenging issues such as privacy, security, and availability. Preserving consumers' privacy is not an easy task due to the sensitive information involved in the interactions between consumers and the trust management service. Protecting cloud services against their malicious users (e.g., such users might give misleading feedback to disadvantage a particular cloud service) is a difficult problem. Guaranteeing the availability of the trust management service is another significant challenge because of the dynamic nature of cloud environments. In this article, we describe the design and implementation of CloudArmor, a reputation-based trust management framework that provides a set of functionalities to deliver trust as a service (TaaS), which includes i) a novel protocol to prove the credibility of trust feedbacks and preserve users' privacy, ii) an adaptive and robust credibility model for measuring the credibility of trust feedbacks to protect cloud services from malicious users and to compare the trustworthiness of cloud services, and iii) an availability model to manage the availability of the decentralized implementation of the trust management service. The feasibility and benefits of our approach have been validated by a prototype and experimental studies using a collection of real-world trust feedbacks on cloud services.