InterCloud: A Data Movement Policy DApp for Managing Trust in the Cloud

We present a smart contract based policy distributed application (DApp) that provides high integrity decentralized cloud policies. Our model allows the cloud to query the policy and get an authorization to proceed; this is an oracle-like system that can be queried by the cloud to obtain customer policy adjudication. InterCloud: 1) removes the conflict of interest created by storing policies and attestations in the cloud and moves them instead into a decentralized blockchain, 2) reduces the dependence on a trusted third parties for attestations, and 3) uses smart contracts to functionally evaluate those policies. We implemented a prototype system and show that real world costs are under a dollar per customer to have a cloud 'whitelist' containing several clouds.