AntiqueData: A proxy to maintain computational transparency in cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing offers computing and software services to users on an on-demand basis. It facilitates users to use computing resources as utility with pay-per-usage billing, which allows users to acquire computational resources with low or no initial cost. Due to this greater level of flexibility, the cloud has become the breeding ground of a new generation of products and services. Since more and more people rely on the cloud with their data and computing, ensuring the trustworthiness of cloud services has become a major issue for both the users and cloud providers. Due to the black box nature of cloud, there has been a lack of trust among providers and users, which has become a major barrier to the widespread growth of cloud computing. One of the trust concerns of cloud is lack of computational transparency. In particular, in current cloud architecture a provider controls all the logging and auditing records corresponding to computation and users do not have access to these records. This is a big concern for many clients of cloud. In this paper, we first identify the risks associated with lack of transparency in cloud and propose a middleware service that eliminates these risks. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.