A Blockchain-based Flight Data Recorder for Cloud Accountability
This tackles accountability issues for cloud customers and providers, but appears incremental as it reviews existing ideas rather than presenting new results.
The paper addresses the challenge of determining responsibility for problems like SLA violations and data breaches in cloud computing by proposing blockchain and smart contracts as a solution for cloud accountability.
Many companies rely on Cloud infrastructures for their computation, communication and data storage requirements. While Cloud services provide some benefits, e.g., replacing high upfront costs for an IT infrastructure with a pay-as-you-go model, they also introduce serious concerns that are notoriously difficult to address. In essence, Cloud customers are storing data and running computations on infrastructures that they can not control directly. Therefore, when problems arise -- violations of Service Level Agreements, data corruption, data leakage, security breaches -- both customers and Cloud providers face the challenge of agreeing on which party is to be held responsible. In this paper, we review the challenges and requirements for enforcing accountability in Cloud infrastructures, and argue that smart contracts and blockchain technologies might provide a key contribution towards accountable Clouds.