Privacy regulation aware service selection for multi-provision cloud service composition

Abstract The proliferation of cloud computing is driving the rapid growth of multi-provision cloud service composition (MPCSC), in which each cloud service provider (CSP) can offer multiple services simultaneously. Due to the openness and virtualization of cloud environments, cloud service providers (CSPs) may collect and distribute users’ privacy information without permission or authorization. More seriously, some CSPs have the ability to infer additional privacy information by combining multiple pieces of such data. Therefore, privacy is one of the main concerns of users seeking to take advantage of cloud services (CSs). This paper aims at addressing this problem by constructing a privacy regulation aware cloud service composition under considering the multi-service provision characteristics of CSPs. Firstly, it models user privacy requirements to formulate the problem of privacy regulation aware service selection for MPCSC (PSSM). Then, it proposes a pre-processed Kuhn-Munkres (KM) algorithm-based approach to solving the PSSM problem. Finally, it demonstrates that the proposed approach is effective and efficient for solving the PSSM problem by conducting a series of simulation experiments.