Clouds Chains of Trust

Establishing trust between remote entities is an important subject, which has been widely discussed in academia and industry. The most commonly known solution attempting to address this problem, which has been adopted by the industry, is that proposed as part of the TCG specifications (known as remote attestation). Establishing remote attestation in the Cloud is critical for its success. However, remote attestation as proposed by the TCG is impractical in Cloud due to the complexity and dynamism of the Cloud. This chapter clarifies this important subject and presents a framework which helps in providing remote attestation in the context of the Cloud environment. The framework addresses the question of how an entity could establish trust in a composition of multiple entities which could change dynamically. The framework also discusses how users could assess the Cloud's trustworthiness without the need to get involved in the complex technical details of the Cloud.