Accountability in Cloud Computing by Means of Chain of Trust

Abstract

Cloud computing offers various services in form of infrastructure, platform, and software to meet the consumer requirements. It is radically changing how information technology services are created, delivered, accessed, and managed. However, this swift has prompted concerns regarding security and privacy due to cloud computing characteristics such as the multi-tenancy, elasticity, and layered architecture. One of the major challenge is to offer accountability in cloud services across all the dependencies. When one entity relies on other entities for functioning, it creates a dependency in system and makes it difficult to sort out the responsible entity among them. In this paper, we analyze the problem of creating accountable cloud services. We utilize basic functionality provided by Trusted Computing Group (TCG) in form of chain of trust (CoT) by securely recording identities (of entities). We propose a solution that modifies existing chain of trust to build accountable cloud computing. We explore dependency relationship in building reliable chain of trust in cloud and define it for better implementation.