Blockchain-based trust management in cloud computing systems: a taxonomy, review and future directions

Abstract Through virtualization and resource integration, cloud computing has expanded its service area and offers a better user experience than the traditional platforms, along with its business operation model bringing huge economic and social benefits. However, a large amount of evidence shows that cloud computing is facing with serious security and trust crisis, and building a trust-enabled transaction environment has become its key factor. The traditional cloud trust model usually adopts a centralized architecture, which causes large management overhead, network congestion and even single point of failure. Furthermore, due to a lack of transparency and traceability, trust evaluation results cannot be fully recognized by all participants. Blockchain is a new and promising decentralized framework and distributed computing paradigm. Its unique features in operating rules and traceability of records ensure the integrity, undeniability and security of the transaction data. Therefore, blockchain is very suitable for constructing a distributed and decentralized trust architecture. This paper carries out a comprehensive survey on blockchain-based trust approaches in cloud computing systems. Based on a novel cloud-edge trust management framework and a double-blockchain structure based cloud transaction model, it identifies the open challenges and gives directions for future research in this field.