A study on the requirements of accountable cloud services and log management

As services themselves and computer resources of cloud services become increasingly non-local, accountability to users for the results and implementation status of the service have emerged as important issues. This paper gives a detailed overview of what would be required to (1) link log data for multiple services supported by non-local servers and (2) trace cloud-based services, focusing on prevailing web-based cloud services. The paper presents a robust accountability framework and discusses how cryptography could be applied to log data accountability.