An anonymous reputation mechanism for cloud computing networks using volunteer resources

Abstract

One of the major problems when using non-dedicated volunteer resources in a distributed network is the high volatility of these hosts since they can go offline or become unavailable at any time without control. Furthermore, the use of volunteer resources implies some security issues due to the fact that they are generally anonymous entities which we know nothing about. So, how to trust in someone we do not know?. Over the last years an important number of reputation-based trust solutions have been designed to evaluate the participants' behavior in a system. However, most of these solutions are addressed to P2P and ad-hoc mobile networks that may not fit well with other kinds of distributed systems that could take advantage of volunteer resources as recent cloud computing infrastructures. In this paper we propose a first approach to design an anonymous reputation mechanism for CoDeS [1], a middleware for building fogs where deploying services using volunteer resources. The participants are reputation clients (RC), a reputation authority (RA) and a certification authority (CA). Users need a valid public key certificate from the CA to register to the RA and obtain the data needed to participate into the system, as now an opaque identifier that we call here pseudonym and an initial reputation value that users provide to other users when interacting together. The mechanism prevents not only the manipulation of the provided reputation values but also any disclosure of the users' identities to any other users or authorities so the anonymity is guaranteed.