Privacy‐aware cloud ecosystems: Architecture and performance

With an increasing number of cloud providers offering services made use of by both individual users and other providers, there is a realization that service provision now involves an “ecosystem” of providers. Some providers may be directly visible to a user, while others may be contributors to composite services and not directly known to the user—as only the provider offering the composite service is visible. Such services may include: domain specific services (eg, simulation), advertising services, or profiling/analytics services. Understanding the impact on data privacy of a user for such a composite service remains a challenge, and providing transparency (and obtaining user consent for data use) remains a key requirement of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). An architecture that makes use of blockchains and smart contracts is proposed that addresses this requirement. An implementation of the architecture is used to demonstrate how access control can be managed and audited. The scalability and cost of undertaking access control, as the number of actors (both service providers and “voters”) increases, is also described. The proposed approach can be used to support service aggregation across both private and public clouds