A Memoryless Trust Computing Mechanism for Cloud Computing

Abstract

Trust management systems play an important role in identifying the quality of service in distributed systems. In cloud computing, trust systems can be used to identify service providers who would meet the requirements of customers. Several trust computing mechanisms have been proposed in literature based on various trust metrics. Most of these systems compute the trust scores incrementally from the previous values. This is major vulnerability that can be exploited by adversaries to attack the system forcing the trust scores towards extreme values. In this paper, the authors present a memoryless trust computing mechanism which is immune to such attacks. The proposed mechanism does not depend on the previous trust scores hence it cannot be forced towards extreme values by repeated requests. The simulations experiments conducted show that the trust scores computed using the proposed mechanism are more representative and stable in the face of attacks compared to other systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.