SocialClouds: Concept, Security Architecture and Some Mechanisms

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm of computing. In the past, two types of cloud computing systems have been discussed, PublicClouds (i.e., vendors making revenue by offering cloud computing services to the public) and PrivateClouds (i.e., enterprises' datacenters serving their own needs but not to the public). In this paper, we envision a third type of cloud computing systems, called SocialClouds. In a SocialCloud, the computing platforms (including hardware, software, and applications) are induced by trust-based social relationships (e.g., the platforms are contributed by a large population of people who are nodes/vertices in a trust- or friendship-based, possibly implicit, social network). We discuss the security challenges posed by SocialClouds, and present a security architecture. We further elaborate on the access control component of the security architecture, and advocate an instantiation through a cryptographic architecture we call CryptoOverlay. To illustrate the utility of this concept, we also propose two CryptoOverlay primitives, called assembly signature and identification schemes.