Trust Evaluation in Cross-Cloud Federation

Abstract

Cross-Cloud Federation (CCF) is beneficial for heterogeneous Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) for leasing additional resources from each other. Despite the benefits of on-demand scalability and enhanced service footprints for better service quality, the adoption of CCF is however mainly hindered due to the lack of a comprehensive trust model. The basic aim of such a model should be to address the security and performance concerns of a home CSP on its foreign peers before placing its users’ data and applications in their premises. A transitivity of users’ trust on home CSP and home CSP's trust on its foreign CSPs marks the uniqueness of trust paradigm in CCF. Addressing the concerns of cloud-to-cloud trust paradigm is inevitable to achieve users’ trust in a federation. Various trust models have been proposed in literature for conventional and multi-cloud computing environments. They focus on user requirements but none on federation perspective. Their applicability to CCF for addressing the concerns of cloud-to-cloud trust paradigm requires further consideration. For this reason, we have first outlined the general characteristics of CCF as being dynamic, multi-level and heterogeneous. Afterwards, cloud-to-cloud trust paradigm is proposed based on a set of unique principles identified as (i) trust bi-directionality, (ii) trust composition, (iii) delegation control, and (iv) Resource awareness. An insightful review of Trust Management Systems (TMS) proposed in literature reveals their shortcomings in addressing the requirements of cloud-to-cloud trust paradigm. To overcome these shortcomings, we suggest that some challenges can be merely addressed by aligning the existing methods to the nature of CCF. The remaining challenges require entirely new mechanisms to be introduced. A demonstration of this concept is presented in the form of a requirement matrix suggesting how the characteristics and properties of both CCF and the TMS are influenced by each other. This requirement matrix reveals the potential avenues of research for a TMS aimed specifically for CCF.