A Cloud Data Movement Policy Architecture Based on Smart Contracts and the Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

An outdated Service Level Agreement (SLA) model, untrusted third parties with access to our data, unknown data location, and unwanted data movement continue to negatively affect trust in the cloud. The majority of current research into cloud trust focuses on ensuring a trustworthy hardware platform using attestations verified by some trusted third party(TTP). We are proposing an approach to improve cloud trust that leverages blockchain technology to help reduce the problem of depending on TTPs for policy evaluation and storage and help track our data. It provides consumers more control and expression of how they want their data handled and by whom. We propose to use Ethereum blockchain for storage and smart contracts as the vehicle for the policies. The main contributions presented in this research are: 1) storing policies in an authoritative source outside the cloud, 2) improving cloud trust by using decentralization, 3) providing a data movement policy model.