Effects of Competition and Reputation on Auditing Cloud Service Provider's Security Commitment

Auditing a cloud service provider's (CSP's) compliance with data backup requirements is of great value to data availability and redundancy. As the checking incurs extra costs, a lot of research has been done to find the optimal checking strategy. However, there remain two problems: 1) What kind of influence does the competition between CSPs for clients have on the checking strategies? 2) How to incorporate the influence of CSP's reputation in a reasonable and practicable way? To solve these problems, we propose a one-population evolutionary game model. The competition for clients is first captured via the game between CSPs. Then, we introduce a reputation term in the game model, which is defined as the function of checking probability. We analyze the model, and then, derive the thresholds of checking probability. A verifier can optimize the use of checking resources whatever checking methods are using according to the thresholds. Finally, we conduct various comparison experiments between our model and another game-based model. The comparison results show that the long-term effects of competition and reputation can help a verifier save checking resources or promote the checking effect.