Trust evaluation in cloud based on friends and third party's recommendations

Establishing trust among service providers and service consumers is very essential and important factor for the widespread use and popularity of any distributed environment which offers services to users through pay-per-use model. On a cloud, virtually any kind of service can be offered and accessed from anywhere anytime. Services available through a cloud are scalable, reliable and more cost effective. Determining trust on a service provider is a complicated and error-prone task because trust means different things to different users and trust depends on several parameters linked with service provider's behavior like his honesty, attitude, reputation, accuracy, reliability of services provided etc. In this paper we have proposed a trust evaluation mechanism which calculates final trust on a service provider based on a user's past experiences with service provider and based on friends and third party's recommendations. The mechanism has been simulated and its applicability, flexibility and robustness have been demonstrated through a typical cloud computing scenario. The simulation results show that the mechanism is workable and can be applied to calculate final trust on a service provider in a cloud environment.