Mobile Cloud Computing and Its Security and Privacy Challenges

Abstract

Mobile cloud computing has grown out of two hot technology trends, mobility and cloud. The emergence of cloud computing and its extension into the mobile domain creates the potential for a global, interconnected mobile cloud computing environment that will allow the entire mobile ecosystem to enrich their services across multiple networks. We can utilize significant optimization and increased operating power offered by cloud computing to enable seamless and transparent use of cloud resources to extend the capability of resource constrained mobile devices. However, in order to realize mobile cloud computing, we need to develop mechanisms to achieve interoperability among heterogeneous and distributed devices. We need solutions to discover best available resources in the cloud servers based on the user demands and approaches to deliver desired resources and services efficiently and in a timely fashion to the mobile terminals. Furthermore, while mobile cloud computing has tremendous potential to enable the mobile terminals to have access to powerful and reliable computing resources anywhere and anytime, we must consider several issues including privacy and security, and reliability in realizing mobile cloud computing. In this chapter, the authors first explore the architectural components required to realize a mobile cloud computing infrastructure. They then discuss mobile cloud computing features with their unique privacy and security implications. They present unique issues of mobile cloud computing that exacerbate privacy and security challenges. They also discuss various approaches to address these challenges and explore the future work needed to provide a trustworthy mobile cloud computing environment.

A Systematic Literature Review of Mobile Cloud Computing

“…MCC needs to achieve reliable security in an environment of interoperability and heterogeneity with the use of mobile devices, therefore, [65], explored security and privacy in MCC, discussing the issues and providing solutions though not a review paper. The work of [66] is a systematic review of cloud computing security requirements.…”

“…However, issues of privacy, security and trust in MCC, network access management, and interoperability in MCC have not been well reported in literature. From the 42 papers that we finally analyzed, only four topics were based on security and privacy in MCC [65,61,49,70] and none on either network access management or interoperability in MCC. The concept of trust in MCC has received little or no attention thus far in the literature.…”

Embedding the three pass protocol messages into transmission control protocol header

“…Djenouri [6] explained that more risks are due to multi-hop transmissions, node movements, network amorphous, power limitations and computation strength on user equipments. Emerging network paradigms such as cloud and fog also introduce more security issues [7][8][9][10][11].…”