Toward a dynamic trust establishment approach for multi-provider intercloud environment

In cloud computing, data are managed by different entities, not only by the actual data owner but also by many cloud providers. Sophisticated clouds collaboration scenarios may require that the data objects are distributed at cloud providers and accessed remotely, while still being under the control of the data owners. This brings security challenges for distributed authorization and trust management that existing proposed schemes have not fully solved. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Trust Establishment approach which can be incorporated into cloud services provisioning life-cycles for the multi-provider Intercloud environment. It relies on attribute-based policies as the mechanism for trust evaluation and delegation. The paper proposes a practical implementation approach for attribute-based policies evaluation using Multi-type Interval Decision Diagrams extended from Integer Decision Diagrams which is more efficient in terms of evaluation complexity than other evaluation approaches.