Peers feedback and compliance based trust computation for cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is a new computing model where software, platform and infrastructure resources are delivered as services using pay-as-you-go model. It gives an excellent way to lease numerous types of distributed resources but it also makes security problems further complicate and more important for cloud users than before. The key barrier to extensive usage of cloud computing is the lack of confidence (trust) in cloud services by potential cloud users. For critical business applications and other sensitive applications, cloud service providers must be selected based on high level of trustworthiness. In this paper, we present a trust model to evaluate service providers in order to help cloud users select the most reliable service providers and services in business. We have made an attempt to design a trust model which enables clients to determine trustworthiness of service providers by taking into account three different types of trust viz. interaction-based trust, compliance-based trust and recommendation-based trust. These types can be assigned appropriate weights to designate precedence among them in order to compute total trust. The model has been simulated using MATLAB. Simulation has been done to validate flexibility, robustness and scalability of the model. The proposed trust model is an attempt towards a model where diverse facets of trust contribute in formation of trust (confidence) in the mind of cloud user about service provider and its offered services.