Towards a trust evaluation middleware for cloud service selection

With the advent of cloud computing, employing various cloud services to build highly reliable cloud applications has become increasingly popular. The trustworthiness of cloud services is a critical issue that hinders the development of cloud applications, and thus is an urgently-required research problem. Previous studies evaluate trustworthiness of services via either QoS monitoring mechanisms or user feedback ratings, while seldom they combine both of them for enhancing service trust evaluation. This paper proposes a trustworthy selection framework for cloud service selection, named TRUSS. Aiming at developing an effective trust evaluation middleware for TRUSS, we propose an integrated trust evaluation method via combining objective trust assessment and subjective trust assessment. The objective trust assessment is based on QoS monitoring, while the subjective trust assessment is based on user feedback ratings. Experiments conducted using a synthesized dataset show that our proposed method significantly outperforms the other trust and reputation methods.