Cloud Security Up for Auction: a DSIC Online Mechanism for Secure IaaS Resource Allocation
Talal Halabi, Martine Bellaïche, Adel Hammad Abusitta · 2018
The lack of security is still one of the main factors that are blocking the full migration towards the Cloud Computing paradigm. More businesses would be attracted by the adoption of the Cloud model if the Cloud Infrastructure Providers (CIP) start increasing their investment in security solutions and demonstrating more explicitly the potency of their infrastructures in protecting customers' data and services. However, implementing security solutions is usually costly, and does not necessarily generate higher revenues. One way to reduce the cost of security investments would be to rent the Cloud secure resources to customers in a competitive fashion. The CIP could place her added value of security up for auction, and customers would place their bids along with their resource provisioning requests. In this paper, we propose an online mechanism that performs the allocation of the CIP's resources to customers in a security-oriented auction-based fashion. The mechanism is Dominant-Strategy Incentive-Compatible (DSIC), i.e., it guaranties the truthfulness of the bidders. The mechanism aims at allocating the resources to customers who valuate their security the most, and shows an acceptable performance compared to the famous offline Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) truthful mechanism.