Ensuring security and availability of cloud data storage using multi agent system architecture

Abstract

We believe that data storage security in cloud computing, an area full of challenges and of paramount importance, is still in its infancy now, and many research problems are yet to be identified. Cloud Computing is the utilization of many servers/ data centers or cloud data storages (CDSs) hosted in many different locations. To ensure the availability of users' data in the cloud we propose architecture of Multi Agent System (MAS). This architecture consists of two main agents: Cloud Service Provider Agent (CSPA) and Cloud Data Availability Agent (CDAA). CDAA has two types of agents: Cloud Data Distribution Preparation Agent (CDDPA) and Cloud Data Retrieval Agent (CDRA). This paper is also illustrated with an example of how our MAS architecture detects distributed cloud server colluding attacks. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.