Communicating trust online is something I’ve touched on a few times recently, with the likes of Deemly attempting to provide a uniform trust rating that follows us around online.

Most of these projects are working on an individual level, but a recent Australian project is working to improve trust levels in an entire technology.

Trust in the cloud

The project was born out of ongoing issues in proving the trust of cloud computing.

“Trust management is a top obstacle in cloud computing, and it’s a challenging area of research,” the team say.

“There are many reasons why people lack faith in the cloud – there’s little to no transparency, often you don’t know who provides the service, and it’s difficult at times for users to know whether certain cloud-based applications or sites are malicious or genuine,” they continue.

The team developed a system known as Cloud Armor, which aims to provide cloud providers with a trust rating out of 100.  The system shares many similarities with sites like the film review site Rotten Tomatoes.

Gauging the accuracy of reviews however, with instances of malicious or even self-promotional, has proved a challenge that the team have tackled head on.

They do this via what they’re calling a credibility model whereby a crawler scans comments made throughout the web to paint a picture of what is and is not credible.

“We’ve tested this with and without our credibility model – without the model, some cloud applications receive a maximum score of 100; but with the model, that score might only get to 50 or 60,” they say.

The work has already been presented at a number of conferences and it is gaining traction across the world.  The ultimate aim is to increase transparency throughout the cloud community and enhance levels of trust in what the technology can do.