A Fair Hash Chain-based On-line Application Services Granting Scheme for Computing Environment

Recently, clouding computing concept is widely adopted and many companies looked for application services from application service providers (ASPs) on the Internet instead of buying software for themselves to save their cost of purchasing software. Since the application access environment is over the Internet and two different parties (the ASP and company) are involved, it is different from the application service granting system that exists inside a company and becomes more and more complex. To protect ASP and company's rights and obligations, we propose a fair application services granting scheme in this paper. Based on our scheme, an ASP can ask a company to pay by presenting an undeniable proof. Meanwhile, a company pays its bill according to its employees' software usage. The company can control its employees' quotas (request times) and the employees can anonymously present their access rights to request their application service. Afterward, the ASP can validate each access request. Moreover, our scheme performs with a low computational power and ASP does not need to maintain a huge database to store their issued access rights, it is suitable to be implemented in a business utility model in a clouding computing environment to solve payment and service problems.