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Standards for Accountability in the Cloud

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8937))

Abstract

This paper examines the role of standards in the cloud with a particular focus on accountability, in the context of the A4Cloud Project (Accountability for the Cloud). To this end, we first provide a general overview of standards, what they are and how we can categorize them, as illustrated by a few cloud-specific examples. Next, we examine the intersection between standards and accountability, by highlighting how standards influence the A4Cloud Project and reciprocally how the A4Cloud Project aims to influence accountability related standards. We argue that specification standards can foster interoperability for the purpose of accountability, thereby making accountability more automated and pervasive. Finally, we take a closer look at a particular accountability requirement: the continuous monitoring of the compliance of cloud services. This is an area of great interest for standardization, which faces many research challenges.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.ieee.org/education_careers/education/standards/standards_glossary.html.

  2. 2.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war.

  3. 3.

    http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2012:0529:FIN:EN:PDF.

  4. 4.

    http://www.cencenelec.eu/research/innovation/standardstypes/Pages/default.aspx.

  5. 5.

    See for example the ISO/IEC 27017 or ISO/IEC 17788 discussed in Sect. 3.1.

  6. 6.

    For example http://www.asd.gov.au/publications/Mitigation_Strategies_2014.pdf.

  7. 7.

    https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/research/ccm/.

  8. 8.

    https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/star/.

  9. 9.

    https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  10. 10.

    https://aws.amazon.com/s3/.

  11. 11.

    See http://www.openstack.org/, https://www.eucalyptus.com/, http://opennebula.org/ and https://cloudstack.apache.org/.

  12. 12.

    http://openid.net/.

  13. 13.

    http://www.realvnc.com/docs/rfbproto.pdf.

  14. 14.

    http://occi-wg.org/.

  15. 15.

    http://techblog.netflix.com/search/label/cloud%20architecture.

  16. 16.

    From the IEEE Standards Glossary. https://www.ieee.org/education_careers/education/standards/standards_glossary.html.

  17. 17.

    http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/european-cloud-computing-strategy.

  18. 18.

    https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/research/ctp/.

  19. 19.

    See the SPECS Fp7 project. http://specs-project.eu/.

  20. 20.

    See the CUMULUS FP7 project. http://www.cumulus-project.eu/.

  21. 21.

    http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2012:0529:FIN:EN:PDF

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Correspondence to Alain Pannetrat .

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Pannetrat, A., Luna, J. (2015). Standards for Accountability in the Cloud. In: Felici, M., Fernández-Gago, C. (eds) Accountability and Security in the Cloud. A4Cloud 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8937. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17199-9_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17199-9_12

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