Identifying Fake Feedback for Effective Trust Management in Cloud Environments

Managing trust in cloud environments is emerging as an important issue in recent years. The highly dynamic, distributed, and non-transparent nature of cloud services makes the trust management of these services difficult. Malicious users may collude to give multiple misleading trust feedback to disadvantage a cloud service, or create several accounts and then leave misleading trust feedback to trick users into trusting cloud services that are not actually trustworthy. In this paper, we propose techniques enabling the identification of fake trust feedbacks and thus provide significant improvement on trust management in cloud environments. In particular, we introduce a credibility model that not only identifies credible trust feedbacks from fake ones, but also preserves the privacy of cloud service consumers. The techniques have been validated by a prototype system implementation and experimental studies.