Trust Assessment Model Based on a Zero Trust Strategy in a Community Cloud Environment

Abstract

The adoption of Cloud Computing services in everyday business life has grown rapidly in recent years due to the many benefits of this paradigm. The various collaboration tools offered by Cloud Computing have eliminated or reduced the notion of distance between entities of the same company or between different organizations. This has led to an increase in the need to share resources (data and services). Community Cloud environments have thus emerged to facilitate interactions between organizations with identical needs and with specific and high security requirements. However, establishing trust and secure resource sharing relationships is a major challenge in this type of complex and heterogeneous environment. This paper proposes a trust assessment model (SeComTrust) based on the Zero Trust cybersecurity strategy. First, the paper introduces a community cloud architecture subdivided into different security domains. Second, it presents a process for selecting a trusted organization for an exchange based on direct or recommended trust value and reputation. Finally, a system for promoting or relegating organizations in the different security domains is applied. Experimental results show that our model guarantees the scalability of a community cloud with a high success rate of secure and quality resource sharing.