Ricardo Puttini: An Anonymity Framework for SaaS

Cloud computing technology has recently experienced rapid growth and continuous adoption. Enterprises are evermore taking advantage of its dynamicity and ubiquity. However, migrating strategic services to the cloud has put embracing companies in a fragile spot. Entrusting key business knowledge to cloud service providers and consequently relinquishing any claims to complete privacy is the tradeoff applied to adopters of the technology. This happens because the cloud computing service model called SaaS (Software as a Service) makes use of service contracts that inherently give the service provider access to unreasonable amounts of information regarding the consumer’s business. The service consumer has, then, no option but to trust the service provider. Because of that, there emerges a demand for a reliable, private and economically viable framework for cloud service consumption.

Our contribution unfolds as a privacy aware environment for cloud service consumption with a payment mechanism for maintaining the commercially feasibility of the SaaS service model. Regarding the supporting of privacy, anonymity techniques are employed both in service contract and network levels. As for the payment methods, encryption algorithms in the area of blind signatures complete the proposed framework.

The speaker was invited by Douglas Wikström.

Ricardo Puttini holds a MSc. in Telecommunications (1997) and a PhD in Communication Networks (2004), both from the University of Brasília, where he teaches at the Electrical Engineering Department since 1998. During his PhD, he spent three semesters in L′Ecole Supérieure d′Életricité (Supelec, Rennes – France), when he started researching on distributed systems architecture and security, which became his main interest area. Ricardo has more than 12 years of field experience as senior IT consultant at major government organizations in Brazil. He has taught several undergraduate and graduate level courses in service orientation, service oriented architecture and cloud computing. Currently, he is responsible for the deployment of the SOA Certification Program (SOACP) in Brazil.