Accountability as a Service for the Cloud

Computing resource provisioning through the use of the Cloud computing paradigm has triggered revolutions in modern day computing. It is a new paradigm for deploying services on rented machines. On the other hand, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has gained wide adoption among organizations due to the importance of collaborations and outsourcing. Therefore the Cloud´s enormous capacity with comparable low cost makes it an ideal platform for SOA deployment. The overall correctness of the SOA deployed in the Cloud depends on the correctness of all individual participants. As the SOA usually spans multiple administration domains, concluding the faulty service and making the provider responsible become a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel design to achieve Trustworthy Service Oriented Architecture (TSOA) in the Cloud through enforcing strong accountability. In such system not only the root of a fault can always be concluded to the guilty participant(s), each conclusion is supported with non-disputable evidence. We also implemented a demonstrative system to show its effectiveness in real practice. Our testing figure indicates the cost of incorporating our design to SOA in the cloud is acceptable.