A trust management framework for clouds

Abstract In today’s cloud computing platforms, more and more users are now working or collaborating in the multi-cloud environment, in which collaborators, clouds, computing nodes may belong to different institutions or organizations. Those different organizations might have their policies. Security is still a big concern in cloud computing. To help cloud vendors and customers to detect and prevent from being affected by potential attacks, we propose a trust management framework. We consider link/flow’s level trust, node’s level trust, and task/mission’s level trust. We introduced a new security metric trustability (trust–reliability) and a new algorithm to calculate it. Trustability measures how much a system can be trusted under a specific attack vector. Trustability can be used to explore the design space of resource configuration in order be able to choose the right trade-off between trustability and cost of redundancy. We show that our trust management framework can guide the administrators and customers to make decisions. For example, based on the real-time trust information, cloud administrators can migrate tasks from suspect nodes to trustworthy nodes, dynamically allocate a resource, and manage the trade-off between the degree of redundancy and the cost of the resource.