Finding Trustable Software Solutions for Secured Cloud based Services

Abstract

In context of social networking, trust is a very significant requirement and service provider is expected to adhere to highest ethical standards while dealing with user’s personal information including personally identifiable information and sensitive information. Service providers face various security challenges such as- web application security threats, privacy breaches and data theft, litigations of intentional or unintentional misuse of user data and business model of social networking requiring social networking services to share user’s contextual information with advertisement providers for displaying targeted and contextual advertisements. With all these, they are not well equipped to provide trustable services to users, on their own. Hence, there is need for using external trusted entities to form an interface between service provider and other third parties during data communication involving user's personal information to ensure user privacy is preserved. As user is the primary stake holder in this eco-system., any proposed design should have a user-centric design with which user has a flexibility to choose from different quality of service based service profiles based on their requirements. We present analysis and connect the dots of a string of research contributions for finding rule & policy based trustable software solutions for secured cloud based services