Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
Cloud computing is one of the dominant and emerging paradigms in Information Technology (IT) that has elevated computing standards to new heights over the past decade by offering services to match end-user needs, while also reducing the cost of acquiring IT infrastructure (Ismail & Islam, 2020; Garg et al., 2020). The Cloud industry has perceived a vigorous growth in recent years, and research has revealed a substantial upsurge in acceptance of the technology, especially during the pandemic of Covid19 in 2020 (Analyticsinsight, 2020). Moreover, Cloud users can use Cloud resources at lower prices with higher performance and flexibility, than the traditional way of on-premise resources, without having to worry about the infrastructure; thus, increasing the importance of Cloud computing in the scientific, academics as well as industrial organisations (Panda et al., 2020). Despite being Cloud computing a promising technology, security stands as one of the major concerns and the foremost hurdle to embracing technology. Security has steadily been a critical concern in information systems. Furthermore, the Cloud computing paradigm's security becomes even more severe and complicated because of the Cloud computing environment's distributed nature. Data and applications are scattered in multiple locations, and heterogeneous infrastructure and storage devices (Raj & Kumar, 2020). Since Cloud computing stores critical data and applications outside the control of the data owner, it inevitably introduces many data security challenges and issues such as identity management and access control (Banday & Mehraj, 2017a; Mehraj & Banday, 2017b; Mehraj & Banday, 2021a), virtualisation (Compastie et al., 2020; Shaikh & Meshram, 2020), data security (Namasudra et al., 2020; Chadwick et al., 2020), trust (Mehraj & Banday, 2020b; Mishra et al., 2020; Gupta P. & Gupta P. K., 2020a) and so on.
Traditional mechanisms to address various security issues measure the system's robustness in the present stage of data inconsistency and privacy breaches. These conventional mechanisms are known as hard security solutions that enforce several security policies before providing any security. However, these mechanisms' performance often fails to guarantee system reliability for insider threat that aims to interrupt the system's normal functioning. As a result, trust management overcomes these problems by evaluating the behaviour of the system's entities. It also, measures experienced behaviour and presents an overall observation about threat or risk associated with the entities. Moreover, trust management is categorised as a mild security solution that provides behaviour evaluation in a system (Sharma et al., 2020). The perception of trust is being explored in various domains like social networks (Gupta & Dhami, 2015), healthcare (Aou-Nassar et al., 2020), ad-hoc networks (Liu et al., 2020), IoT (El-Latif et al., 2018; Chahal et al., 2020), and so on. Besides, trust is a multidimensional notion that spans many fields and is defined as the degree of belief towards a specific entity's events and behaviour (Sharma et al., 2020).