Trust Management in an Open Computing Environment

An open computing environment, in which users can trade computing resources without organizational constraints, suffers from uncertainty about the quality of security, the quality of service provided, and the observation of privacy. To overcome this uncertainty, an open computing environment requires trust of the consumer and the service provider. Since trust is a subjective belief of a person about another person, technological solutions cannot be sufficient to resolve trust issues. This paper, instead, suggest to apply economic approaches to addreass uncertainty. These approaches have their orgin in the area of insurance policies and portfolio management. Both economic approaches try to compensate for the inherent uncertainty and, therefore, improve the trustworthiness of an open computing environment. The insurance-based approach performs best in an environment with low uncertainty but becomes unstable as the uncertainty of computing resources increases. The portfolio approach is more suitable to guarantee the system stability when the uncertainty of the environment is large.