An Accountable Identity-Based Billing Protocol for Cloud Environment

Various IT strategies to utilize cost-saving cloud computing environment have been widely adopted by individuals, enterprises, and governments to reduce hardware and infrastructure management cost. Therefore, how to establish a trustable billing service between cloud computing providers and their customers is a critical issue for pay-per-use based cloud computing services. In this paper, a secure identity-based billing protocol is proposed to support customer authentication, serivice consumption verification, and billing accountability during a billing transaction session.