A Reliability-Based Trust Management Mechanism for Cloud Services

With the increasing demand for cloud services, trust management has become a challenging and important issue in a cloud computing environment. In a trust management mechanism, trust feedback is used to derive trust evaluation results. However, the reliability of the trust feedback from cloud service users needs to be considered, because unreliable trust feedback can produce wrong trust results. In this paper, we first propose a trust management framework for cloud computing environments, and then we introduce an effective reliability-based filtering mechanism to ensure the reliability of trust feedback for cloud computing services. The filtering mechanism uses two important factors, namely, familiarity and consistency, to filter out unreliable trust feedback. Our experiments show that our proposed reliability-based trust management mechanism is effective.