Intercloud Trust and Security Decision Support System: an Ontology-based Approach

As Cloud Computing evolves, both customers and Cloud Service Providers are starting to require Intercloud scenarios where different clouds have to interact each other. Although there are some initial proposals to manage the Intercloud, there are still few approaches dealing with the associated new security and trust challenges in such a federated environment. To fill this gap, this paper presents SOFIC (Security Ontology For the InterCloud) aimed to formally describe the security aspects that are subject to be modeled in an Intercloud security assessment. SOFIC is based on standards and has been tailored extensible to cope with the security requirements of different Intercloud scenarios. The paper also shows in which way the ontology is used as input for a Trust and Security Decision Support System, in order to assist in the Intercloud security decision making process, quantifying security expectations and trustworthiness about Cloud Service Providers. The implementation, experiments and performance evaluation show the feasibility of the proposed ontology and system.