Trust in the Cloud

Abstract

Cloud infrastructure is expected to be able to support Internet scale critical applications (e.g. hospital systems and smart grid systems). Critical infrastructure services and organizations alike will not outsource their critical applications to a public Cloud without strong assurances that their requirements will be enforced. Central to this concern is that the user should be provided with evidence of the trustworthiness of the elements of the Cloud. Establishing Cloud’s trust model is important but the Cloud’s infrastructure complexity and dynamism makes it difficult to address.

Establishing trust in the Cloud is one of the key objectives of the EU funded TClouds (Trustworthy Clouds) project¹. In TClouds we focus on building trust models that provide various levels of transparency in the context of technical complexities and trust establishment. These trust models are not only beneficial to a Cloud’s users, but also to Cloud providers, collaborating Clouds-of-Clouds, and external auditors. In this paper we explore this problem, and summarize some of the recent results from the TClouds project in context of trust establishment.