1 * N Trust Establishment within Dynamic Collaborative Clouds

Abstract

Federation of security entities in cloud environments has crucial challenges in terms of policy reservations required for each of the multi-tenancy requests. In collaborative clouds, the problem is compounded due to the fact that the tenancy requester would be completely unaware of the end cloud provider. As the tenancy requesters would not have established any negotiation terms with the end cloud provider, it is a complex challenge to ensure dependability in terms of trust, privacy and security of data exchanges. Existing approaches require establishment of point to point trust. However, in the larger context of possible collaborative cloud providers, there is a need for simplified trust management for tenants. Asking the tenants to exclusively establish trust relationships with each other hinders the choice of providers thereby restricting the dynamic collaborations. We propose an approach based on a model wherein a single security mediator is responsible for sharing the required trust with all involved cloud providers within the collaboration. This mediator acts as a hub for all the participant tenants. The tenants establish negotiation terms with the mediator. Whenever the tenancy request needs to be satisfied by a subsequent cloud provider, first a trust is established between the mediator and the new cloud provider. Once this level of trust is accepted and confirmed by the tenancy requester, this provider is added as a trusted provider and tenancy requests can be satisfied by this specific cloud provider.