A Mutually Verifiable Billing System For The Cloud Computing Environment

Information Technology

Cloud Computing Is an Important Transition That Makes Change In Service Oriented Computing Technology. With The Widespread Adoption Of Cloud Computing, The Ability To Record And Account For The Usage Of Cloud Resources In A Credible And Verifiable Way Has Become Critical For Cloud Service Providers And Users Alike. The Success of Such A Billing System Depends On Several Factors: The Billing Transactions Must Have Integrity and No Repudiation Capabilities the Billing Transactions Must Be No Obstructive and Have A Minimal Computation Cost; And the Service Level Agreement (SLA) Monitoring Should Be Provided In A Trusted Manner. Existing Billing Systems Are Limited In Terms Of Security Capabilities or Computational Overhead. This Project Proposes A Secure And Non Obstructive Billing System Called THEMIS As A Remedy For These Limitations. The System Uses A Novel Concept Of A Cloud Notary Authority For The Supervision Of Billing. The Cloud Notary Authority Generates Mutually Verifiable Binding Information That Can Be Used To Resolve Future Disputes Between A User And A Cloud Service Provider In A Computationally Efficient Way. Even Administrator of A Cloud System Cannot Modify or Falsify the Data. The research proposes an Accounting Layer tasked with the job of collecting and managing data that is to be fed to the Business Layer. Data collected through the Accounting Layer is measured against Service Level Agreement metrics. The Accounting Layer obtains real-time performance metrics relating to CPU and memory usage, as well as key performance indicator measures using custom software probes or software agents designed to collect operating health of software running in a given virtual machine being monitored.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.