The Cloud Needs a Reputation System

TL;DR

This paper introduces Seit, a reputation-based framework for managing interactions among cloud services, enhancing security, reducing costs, and enabling reputation-driven discovery in dynamic cloud environments.

Contribution

Seit is a novel, fully-implemented reputation system integrated into various cloud management components, addressing the need for dynamic, inter-tenant trust management in cloud computing.

Findings

Seit improves security by isolating malicious tenants.

Seit reduces infrastructure costs through adaptive management.

Reputation influences service discovery, increasing provider revenues.

Abstract

Today's cloud apps are built from many diverse services that are managed by different parties. At the same time, these parties, which consume and/or provide services, continue to rely on arcane static security and entitlements models. In this paper, we introduce Seit, an inter-tenant framework that manages the interactions between cloud services. Seit is a software-defined reputation-based framework. It consists of two primary components: (1) a set of integration and query interfaces that can be easily integrated into cloud and service providers' management stacks, and (2) a controller that maintains reputation information using a mechanism that is adaptive to the highly dynamic environment of the cloud. We have fully implemented Seit, and integrated it into an SDN controller, a load balancer, a cloud service broker, an intrusion detection system, and a monitoring framework. We evaluate the efficacy of Seit using both an analytical model and a Mininet-based emulated environment. Our analytical model validate the isolation and stability properties of Seit. Using our emulated environment, we show that Seit can provide improved security by isolating malicious tenants, reduced costs by adapting the infrastructure without compromising security, and increased revenues for high quality service providers by enabling reputation to impact discovery.