Trustworthy cloud certification: A model-based approach

Cloud computing is introducing an architectural paradigm shift that involves a large part of the IT industry. The flexibility in allocating and releasing resources at runtime creates new business opportunities for service providers and their customers. However, despite its advantages, cloud computing is still not showing its full potential. Lack of mechanisms to formally assess the behavior of the cloud and its services/processes, in fact, negatively affects the trust relation between providers and potential customers, limiting customer movement to the cloud. Recently, cloud certification has been proposed as a means to support trustworthy services by providing formal evidence of service behavior to customers. One of the main limitations of existing approaches is the uncertainty introduced by the cloud on the validity and correctness of existing certificates. In this paper, we present a trustworthy cloud certification approach based on model verification. Our approach checks certificate validity at runtime, by continuously verifying the correctness of the service model at the basis of certification activities against real and synthetic service execution traces.