On Subjective Trust for Privacy Policy Enforcement in Cloud Computing

The growth of cloud computing over the last few years has created an ecosystem where it is necessary for the clients to transact with cloud service providers even though the cloud service clients may or may not completely trust the provider. There is a need for the provider to acknowledge this subjective trust assessment by each client and provide services based on the trust assessment individually to each client. This paper proposes a policy based approach to the implementation of subjective trust for privacy policy enforcement in a cloud computing environment. We present an abstract model containing computational, storage and monitoring unit with configurable elements and describe algorithms that reflects how a change of trust influences the configuration of the elements. We prototype a storage middleware based on the abstract model and benchmark our system.