Biblio

During the last years, many trust and reputation models have been proposed, each one targeting different contexts and purposes, and with their own particularities. While most contributions focus on defining ever-increasing complex models, little attention has been paid to the process of building these models inside applications during their implementation. The result is that models have traditionally considered as ad-hoc and after-the-fact solutions that do not always fit with the design of the application. To overcome this, we propose an object-oriented development framework onto which it is possible to build applications that require functionalities provided by trust and reputation models. The framework is extensible and flexible enough to allow implementing an important variety of trust models. This paper presents the framework, describes its main components, and gives examples on how to use it in order to implement three different trust models.

Cloud sourcing consists of outsourcing data, services and infrastructure to cloud providers. Even when this outsourcing model brings advantages to cloud customers, new threats also arise as sensitive data and critical IT services are beyond customers' control. When an organization considers moving to the cloud, IT decision makers must select a cloud provider and must decide which parts of the organization will be outsourced and to which extent. This paper proposes a methodology that allows decision makers to evaluate their trust in cloud providers. The methodology provides a systematic way to elicit knowledge about cloud providers, quantify their trust factors and aggregate them into trust values that can assist the decision-making process. The trust model that we propose is based on trust intervals, which allow capturing uncertainty during the evaluation, and we define an operator for aggregating these trust intervals. The methodology is applied to an eHealth scenario.