Enforcing trustworthy cloud SLA with witnesses: A game theory–based model using smart contracts

There lacks trust between the cloud customer and provider to enforce traditional cloud SLA (Service Level Agreement) where the blockchain technique seems a promising solution. However, current explorations still face challenges to prove that the off‐chain SLO (Service Level Objective) violations really happen before recorded into the on‐chain transactions. In this paper, a witness model is proposed implemented with smart contracts to solve this trust issue. The introduced role, “Witness”, gains rewards as an incentive for performing the SLO violation report, and the payoff function is carefully designed in a way that the witness has to tell the truth, for maximizing the rewards. This fact that the witness has to be honest is analyzed and proved using the Nash Equilibrium principle of game theory. For ensuring the chosen witnesses are random and independent, an unbiased selection algorithm is proposed to avoid possible collusions. An auditing mechanism is also introduced to detect potential malicious witnesses. Specifically, we define three types of malicious behaviors and propose quantitative indicators to audit and detect these behaviors. Moreover, experimental studies based on Ethereum blockchain demonstrate the proposed model is feasible, and indicate that the performance, ie, transaction fee, of each interface follows the design expectations.