Cooperative data management services based on accountable contract

Abstract

Data management services, such as Amazon S3 and SimpleDB, become increasingly popular for businesses to "outsource" data management functionalities. However, to benefit from such services, subscribing businesses and data management service providers must trust each other for their data and operations. One cornerstone for establishing such mutual trust is accountability support, which enables misbehavior detections so that a service provider and consumer can independently validate data integrity and agreed performance metrics. Currently, the lack of accountability support limits the expansion of data management services. The paper proposes a new service model for building accountable data management services where service providers and consumers can use witnesses to audit their behaviors. As such accountability support comes at the cost of overall data service performance, the paper particularly tackles the challenge on how to balance data service performance and accountability. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.