Enhancing Cloud-Based IoT Security Through Trustworthy Cloud Service: An Integration of Security and Reputation Approach

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides a new paradigm for the development of heterogeneous and distributed systems, and it has increasingly become a ubiquitous computing service platform. However, due to the lack of sufficient computing and storage resources dedicated to the processing and storage of huge volumes of the IoT data, it tends to adopt a cloud-based architecture to address the issues of resource constraints. Hence, a series of challenging security and trust concerns have arisen in the cloud-based IoT context. To this end, a novel trust assessment framework for the security and reputation of cloud services is proposed. This framework enables the trust evaluation of cloud services in order to ensure the security of the cloud-based IoT context via integrating security- and reputation-based trust assessment methods. The security-based trust assessment method employs the cloud-specific security metrics to evaluate the security of a cloud service. Furthermore, the feedback ratings on the quality of cloud service are exploited in the reputation-based trust assessment method in order to evaluate the reputation of a cloud service. The experiments conducted using a synthesized dataset of security metrics and a real-world web service dataset show that our proposed trust assessment framework can efficiently and effectively assess the trustworthiness of a cloud service while outperforming other trust assessment methods.