Analyzing trust concerns in public clouds using finite state automata

Abstract

The perquisites of cloud computing as utility computing over conventional computing are quite evident yet not all users have come to fully embrace this new computing paradigm. The major concern regarding cloud computing is that of the associated security risks. Security risks keep users doubting whether to migrate to the cloud hence triggering trust concerns. Cloud service providers are tasked with the burden of proving to users that they are able to live up to the challenge. Many solutions have been suggested to mitigate cloud security challenges but trust concerns have always lurked in the background. This paper proposes the use of a conceptual finite state automaton to partition the various instances of cloud data into states and transitions. The security concerns of each state and transitions are henceforth analyzed with respect to trust concerns which arise under those respective instances. Since a finite state automaton is scalable, new emerging trust concerns can be addressed by integrating the security concerns they emanate from into new instances of states or transitions hence the flexibility of the proposed approach.