A comprehensive study of the trust evaluation mechanisms in the cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is a new model to enable convenient and on-demand access to the pool of configurable computing resources. In this kind of computing platform, the confidences are insufficient for the customers to identify the trustworthy cloud service providers. Therefore, one of the most important challenges in this environment is to evaluate the trust value to enable users for selecting the trustworthy resources, however, to the best of our knowledge, the comprehensive and detailed review of the most important techniques in this field is very rare. Hence, in this paper, the comprehensive and detailed study and survey of the state of the art techniques and mechanisms in this field are provided. Also, we discuss the trust evaluating mechanisms in the cloud computing and categorize them into two main groups including centralized and distributed mechanisms. Furthermore, we defined trust characteristics such as integrity, security, availability, reliability, dependability, safety, dynamicity, confidentiality and scalability, and we discuss the trust applications including monitoring and tracking. Also, this survey paper provides a discussion of differences between considered techniques in terms of integrity, security, availability, reliability, dependability, safety, dynamicity, confidentiality and scalability as well as directions for future research.