Effective Third Party Auditing in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is the next phase in the Internet's evolution, providing the means through which computing power, computing infrastructure, applications, business processes can be delivered to businesses and individual as a service wherever and whenever they need. Businesses who use cloud service providers (CSP) tend to have service level agreements (SLA) that act as contract and define the level of expected service from the CSP, including availability, performance and security. Recent research suggests the use of third party auditors (TPA) as a mean to monitor CSPs. This paper shows how CSP may deceit the SLA to reduce their cost and become more competitive, while avoiding detection by TPAs. The paper presents a crowdsourced TPA model to monitor the CSPs and consequently detect any deception.