Paper Info
Title
THEMIS: A Mutually Verifiable Billing System for the Cloud Computing Environment
Abstract
With the widespread adoption of cloud computing, the ability to record and account for the usage of cloud resources in a credible and verifiable way has become critical for cloud service providers and users alike. The success of such a billing system depends on several factors: The billing transactions must have integrity and nonrepudiation capabilities; the billing transactions must be nonobstructive and have a minimal computation cost; and the service level agreement (SLA) monitoring should be provided in a trusted manner. Existing billing systems are limited in terms of security capabilities or computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a secure and nonobstructive billing system called THEMIS as a remedy for these limitations. The system uses a novel concept of a cloud notary authority for the supervision of billing. The cloud notary authority generates mutually verifiable binding information that can be used to resolve future disputes between a user and a cloud service provider in a computationally efficient way. Furthermore, to provide a forgery-resistive SLA monitoring mechanism, we devised a SLA monitoring module enhanced with a trusted platform module (TPM), called S-Mon. The performance evaluation confirms that the overall latency of THEMIS billing transactions (avg. 4.89 ms) is much shorter than the latency of public key infrastructure (PKI)-based billing transactions (avg. 82.51 ms), though THEMIS guarantees identical security features as a PKI. This work has been undertaken on a real cloud computing service called iCubeCloud.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/TSC.2012.1
IEEE T. Services Computing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
cloud service provider,cloud resource,billing system,S-Mon,TPM,THEMIS billing transaction,cloud computing service,forgery-resistive SLA monitoring mechanism,security capability,cloud notary authority,existing billing system,Records,nonobstructive billing system,themis billing transaction,trusted computing,verification,software performance evaluation,transaction processing,PKI,iCubeCloud,computational overhead,verifiable billing system,service level agreement monitoring,billing transaction,and resource allocation,mutually verifiable billing system,performance evaluation,cloud computing,trusted platform module,pricing,real cloud computing service,system monitoring,cloud computing environment,security of data
Journal
6
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
1939-1374
26
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.19
17
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ki-Woong Park111323.38
Jae-sun Han2503.59
Jaewoong Chung399352.00
Kyu Ho Park472979.92