Service Insurance: A New Approach in Cloud Brokerage

Cloud service selection using cloud service brokers: approaches and challenges

Abstract: Cloud computing users are faced with a wide variety of services to choose from. Consequently, a number of cloud service brokers (CSBs) have emerged to help users in their service selection process. This paper reviews the recent approaches that have been introduced and used for cloud service brokerage and discusses their challenges accordingly. We propose a set of attributes for a CSB to be considered effective. Different CSBs’ approaches are classified as either single service or multiple service models. The CSBs are then assessed, analyzed, and compared with respect to the proposed set of attributes. Based on our studies, CSBs with multiple service models that support more of the proposed effective CSB attributes have wider application in cloud computing environments.

Service Provisioning in Cloud: A Systematic Survey

Abstract: Cloud Computing is all about delivering services over the Internet. It has some technical, business and economical aspects. The complexity of service provisioning has increased significantly with the increasing number of cloud services and their providers. This creates a complex situation and as a result the service provisioning techniques face hurdles. The challenge of service provisioning is to properly offer services by adjusting the complexities efficiently. There are significant works to solve the problem in different manners. But still there are some gaps that are to be noticed and bridged for future advancement of cloud technology research. In this paper an attempt has been made for analyzing the service provisioning techniques from different perspectives. The said perspectives are various techniques and methodologies, QoS parameter considered, context awareness, etc. Moreover, the role of a broker in this context is also addressed. The overall motivation is to identify the open challenges, that may provide a future research direction in context of service provisioning.

Insurance for Improving User Satisfaction Level

Abstract: Service-level agreement (SLA) violations may lead to losses and user dissatisfaction. Despite the fact that a service guarantee can increase the satisfaction level of users, indemnities may not be commensurate with the importance of a service to a user. While predefined penalties may be insufficient to compensate for the losses of one user, another user may not suffer loss from the SLA violation. With an insurance plan, an insurer can reach an agreement with users on the premium and loss coverage volume; insurance can therefore be considered a solution for providing indemnity which is appropriate to the importance of service. An insurer cannot protect users against these losses, which are caused by a single root event, in the same way as it protects them against the losses caused by independent events. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed for providing insurance coverage for such root events by limiting insurance provisions to the users with the highest priority. A criterion is presented for priority assignment to users, and an algorithm is then proposed for providing insurance according to this priority. A game-theoretic analysis is also provided to assess acceptability of the outcome of the proposed algorithm to rational users and insurers. The results of numerical experiments demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach for improving the utility of the service.

Privacy-Preserving Public Auditing for Data Storage Security in Cloud Computing

Abstract: Cloud Computing is the long dreamed vision of computing as a utility, where users can remotely store their data into the cloud so as to enjoy the on-demand high quality applications and services from a shared pool of configurable computing resources. By data outsourcing, users can be relieved from the burden of local data storage and maintenance. However, the fact that users no longer have physical possession of the possibly large size of outsourced data makes the data integrity protection in Cloud Computing a very challenging and potentially formidable task, especially for users with constrained computing resources and capabilities. Thus, enabling public auditability for cloud data storage security is of critical importance so that users can resort to an external audit party to check the integrity of outsourced data when needed. To securely introduce an effective third party auditor (TPA), the following two fundamental requirements have to be met: 1) TPA should be able to efficiently audit the cloud data storage without demanding the local copy of data, and introduce no additional on-line burden to the cloud user; 2) The third party auditing process should bring in no new vulnerabilities towards user data privacy. In this paper, we utilize and uniquely combine the public key based homomorphic authenticator with random masking to achieve the privacy-preserving public cloud data auditing system, which meets all above requirements. To support efficient handling of multiple auditing tasks, we further explore the technique of bilinear aggregate signature to extend our main result into a multi-user setting, where TPA can perform multiple auditing tasks simultaneously. Extensive security and performance analysis shows the proposed schemes are provably secure and highly efficient.

Cloud Computing: Benefits, Risks and Recommendations for Information Security

Abstract: The presentation “Cloud Computing: Benefits, risks and recommendations for information security” will cover some the most relevant information security implications of cloud computing from the technical, policy and legal perspective.

On Technical Security Issues in Cloud Computing

Abstract: The Cloud Computing concept offers dynamically scalable resources provisioned as a service over the Internet. Economic benefits are the main driver for the Cloud, since it promises the reduction of capital expenditure (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx). In order for this to become reality, however, there are still some challenges to be solved. Amongst these are security and trust issues, since the user's data has to be released to the Cloud and thus leaves the protection-sphere of the data owner. Most of the discussions on this topics are mainly driven by arguments related to organizational means. This paper focuses on technical security issues arising from the usage of Cloud services and especially by the underlying technologies used to build these cross-domain Internet-connected collaborations.

Privacy, Security and Trust Issues Arising from Cloud Computing

Abstract: Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm for large scale infrastructures. It has the advantage of reducing cost by sharing computing and storage resources, combined with an on-demand provisioning mechanism relying on a pay-per-use business model. These new features have a direct impact on the budgeting of IT budgeting but also affect traditional security, trust and privacy mechanisms. Many of these mechanisms are no longer adequate, but need to be rethought to fit this new paradigm. In this paper we assess how security, trust and privacy issues occur in the context of cloud computing and discuss ways in which they may be addressed.

Resource management for isolation enhanced cloud services

Abstract: The cloud infrastructure provider (CIP) in a cloud computing platform must provide security and isolation guarantees to a service provider (SP), who builds the service(s) for such a platform. We identify last level cache (LLC) sharing as one of the impediments to finer grain isolation required by a service, and advocate two resource management approaches to provide performance and security isolation in the shared cloud infrastructure - cache hierarchy aware core assignment and page coloring based cache partitioning. Experimental results demonstrate that these approaches are effective in isolating cache interference impacts a VM may have on another VM. We also incorporate these approaches in the resource management (RM) framework of our example cloud infrastructure, which enables the deployment of VMs with isolation enhanced SLAs.