Agent-Based Evidence Collection in Cloud Computing

Nowadays there are many offerings of cloud services all over the world which have various security requirements depending on their business use. The compliance of these cloud services with the predefined security policies should be proven. In a cloud infrastructure this is not an easy job, because of its immense complexity. This paper proposes an architecture which uses software agents as its core components to collect evidence across the different layers of cloud infrastructures (Cloud Managment System, Hypervisor, VM, etc.) and builds a chain of evidence to prove compliance with predefined security policies.