Contractual Agreement Design for Enforcing Honesty in Cloud Outsourcing

摘要

To save time and money, businesses and individuals have begun outsourcing their data and computations to cloud computing services. These entities would, however, like to ensure that the queries they request from the cloud services are being computed correctly. In this paper, we use the principles of economics and competition to vastly reduce the complexity of query verification on outsourced data. Instead of building a specialized computation system for verifying the result of a single outsourced query, we rely on a second, non-colluding data outsourcing entity, whose services are required only a miniscule fraction of the time. Using a game theoretic model, we show that given the proper incentive structure, we can effectively deter dishonest behavior on the part of the data outsourcing services with a very small expected cost increase. We then prove that the incentive for an outsourcing service to cheat can be reduced to zero under this structure.