A new trust evaluation approach for cloud computing environments

This paper introduces a novel trust evaluation approach for the cloud computing domain. The wide majority of the existing trust systems are either limited to the qualitative or the quantitative assessment of trust. Even those that combine qualitative and quantitative assessment, present several limitations. For instance, they do not take into account the user's technical requirements. They do not either apply serious measures to detect malicious feedbacks. These restrictions have a detrimental effect on trust establishment in today's cloud computing environments, which are characterized by heterogeneity in providers, services and users. This heterogeneity is also hidden by evaluating trust similarly for all cloud services. In this paper, we designed a new trust evaluation approach that leverages the correlation between QoS attributes. Our approach takes into account all the relevant features of cloud environments and shortcomings of prior trust models. A case study reveals that our proposed approach performs better than similar trust models and capable of deterring unreasonable feedbacks inhibiting the accuracy of the calculated trust values.