MMBcloud-tree: Authenticated index for verifiable cloud service selection

Cloud brokers have been recently introduced as an additional computational layer to facilitate cloud selection and service management tasks for cloud consumers. However, existing brokerage schemes on cloud service selection typically assume that brokers are completely trusted, and do not provide any guarantee over the correctness of the service recommendations. It is then possible for a compromised or dishonest broker to easily take advantage of the limited capabilities of the clients and provide incorrect or incomplete responses. To address this problem, we propose an innovative cloud service selection verification (CSSV) scheme and index structures (MMBcloud-Tree) to enable cloud clients to detect misbehavior of the cloud brokers during the service selection process. We demonstrate correctness and efficiency of our approaches both theoretically and empirically.