Evaluation and Establishment of Trust in Cloud Federation

Cloud federation is a future evolution of Cloud computing, where Cloud Service Providers (CSP) collaborate dynamically to share their virtual infrastructure for load balancing and meeting the Quality of Service during the demand spikes. Today, one of the major obstacles in adoption of federation is the lack of trust between Cloud providers participating in federation. In order to ensure the security of critical and sensitive data of customers, it is important to evaluate and establish the trust between Cloud providers, before redirecting the customer's requests from one provider to other provider. We are proposing a trust evaluation model and underlying protocol that will facilitate the cloud providers to evaluate the trustworthiness of each other and hence participate in federation to share their infrastructure in a trusted and reliable way.