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

• Published in: Journal of grid computing 2015-09, Vol.13 (3), p.425-456
• Main Authors: Bernabe, Jorge Bernal, Perez, Gregorio Martinez, Skarmeta Gomez, Antonio F.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Assessments; Cloud computing; Computer information security; Computer Science; Decision making; Decision support systems; Feasibility studies; Knowledge representation; Management of Computing and Information Systems; Mathematical models; Ontology; Performance evaluation; Processor Architectures; Proposals; Security; Security aspects; Trust; Trustworthiness; User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction
• ISSN: 1570-7873; 1572-9184
• DOI: 10.1007/s10723-015-9346-7

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.