An SLA-based Framework for Estimating Trustworthiness of a Cloud

In cloud computing consumers often seek some assurance from cloud service providers (CSPs) that services will be provided according to consumers' requirements. The ''service-level-agreement'' (SLA) between a CSP and a consumer solves this issue to an extent and provides some level of assurance. However, SLAs alone do not solve the issue entirely as there is no unique rule to create an SLA. They vary in description, length, and types of information released. Therefore, consumers need a better way of estimating 'trustworthiness' of a cloud (CSP). In this work we propose a framework to alleviate the above issue. Our framework estimates trustworthiness of a cloud using a quantitative model of trust. We identified and formalized several parameters that can be extracted from SLA or retrieved during the sessions and are used to estimate trust.