Establishing Trust in Cloud Services via Integration of Cloud Trust Protocol with a Trust Label System

Cloud computing has transformed the computing landscape by enabling flexible compute-resource provisioning. The rapid growth of cloud computing and its large-scale nature provide many advantages to business enterprises. Lack of trust in cloud services however remains a major barrier to the adoption of cloud computing. Trust issues typically relate to concerns about the location, protection and privacy of data. The concept of trust includes trust in both novel technologies and cloud service providers and is composed of both persistent and dynamic trust elements. We have previously developed a trust label system that is capable of facilitating both persistent and dynamic trust building in both cloud services and cloud service providers; however, it lacks reliable information delivery mechanisms. The Cloud Trust Protocol (CTP) aims to provide a reliable information communication system for cloud service consumers and thus offers a natural complement to the trust label system by providing a reliable and interoperable information exchange mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel integration of the trust label system with CTP to provide end-to-end visibility of cloud service operational information to consumers.