Cloud Management and Security

10 Provenance in Clouds

Verifiers (e.g., users, forensic investigators, and even Cloud providers) should be provided with evidence about the trustworthiness of the operations management of the Cloud. Assessing the operations management of Clouds is important, but the Cloud’s infrastructure complexity and dynamism make it difficult to address. This chapter establishes a framework for setting up a trustworthy provenance system. This helps in monitoring, verifying, and tracking the operations management of the Cloud infrastructure, for example it helps in the direction of proactive service management, finding the cause of incidents, customer billing assurance, security monitoring (as in the case of lessening the effects of insider threats), security and incident reporting, and tracking both management data and customer data across the infrastructural resources.

10.1 Introduction

Cloud computing is an increasingly popular approach for the processing of large data sets and computationally expensive programs. This includes scenarios that have clear requirements for maintaining the provenance of data, including eScience [1] and healthcare [2], where assurance in the quality and repeatability of results is essential. In addition, Clouds have their own application for provenance: the identification of the origins of faults and security violations. However, Cloud systems are structured in a fundamentally different way from other distributed systems, such as grids, and therefore present ...