Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Objectives: This paper proposes a new mobile agent based cloud security framework comprising four different security and authentication layers to establish the trust relationship between two entities before using cloud services.
Methods/Analysis: The proposed framework is divided into four layers with each layer performing authentication, verification and integrity at different levels of communication between two entities. An algorithm is used to check and analyze the validity and functionality of each layer. Mobile agents are used as main components for performing different tasks assigned and requested by clients from cloud service providers.
Findings: The framework uses authenticated mobile agents from both clients and cloud service provider to perform the tasks on behalf of users to establish trustworthy computing relationship. This makes the whole process transparent and clear according to users and cloud service providers’ perspective. The proposed framework effectively ensures privacy and security of client data and gives control to client over his data using the security agents.
Conclusion/Application: The main contribution of this paper is undoubtedly the agreement of trustworthy relationship between two entities to agree on security service level agreements to dynamically configure and add mobile agents on virtual machines handled by task managers in their respective mobile agent platforms.

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Cloud Security, Cloud Security Framework, Mobile Agents and Trust Relationship