Biblio

Cloud computing is becoming a key IT infrastructure technology being adopted progressively by companies and users. Still, there are issues and uncertainties surrounding its adoption, such as security and how users data is dealt with that require attention from developers, researchers, providers and users. The A4Cloud project tries to help solving the problem of accountability in the cloud by providing tools that support the process of achieving accountability. This paper presents the contents of the first A4Cloud tutorial. These contents include basic concepts and tools developed within the project. In particular, we will review how metrics can aid the accountability process and some of the tools that the A4Cloud project will produce such as the Data Track Tool (DTT) and the Cloud Offering Advisory Tool (COAT).

Transparency and verifiability are necessary aspects of accountability, but care needs to be taken that auditing is done in a privacy friendly way. There are situations where it would be useful for certain actors to be able to make restricted views within service provision chains on accountability evidence, including logs, available to other actors with specific governance roles. For example, a data subject or a Data Protection Authority (DPA) might want to authorize an accountability agent to act on their behalf, and be given access to certain logs in a way that does not compromise the privacy of other actors or the security of involved data processors. In this paper two cryptographic-based techniques that may address this issue are proposed and assessed.