Promoting Distributed Accountability in the Cloud

Cloud computing enables highly scalable services to be easily consumed over the Internet on an as-needed basis. A major feature of the cloud services is that users´ data is usually processed remotely in unknown machines that users do not own or operate. While enjoying the convenience brought by this new emerging technology, users´ fears of losing control of their own data(particularly financial and health data) can become a significant barrier to the wide adoption of cloud services. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel highly decentralized information accountability framework to keep track of the actual usage of the users´ data in the cloud. In particular, we leverage the programmable capability of Java JAR files to enclose our logging mechanism together with users´ data and policies. Our approach ensures that any access to users´ data will trigger authentication and automated logging local to the JARs. To strengthen user´s control, we also provide distributed auditing mechanisms. Our experimental study demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approaches.