Data security in mobile cloud computing paradigm: a survey, taxonomy and open research issues

Abstract

The incessant spurt of research activities to augment capabilities of resource-constrained mobile devices by leveraging heterogeneous cloud resources has created a new research impetus called mobile cloud computing. However, this rapid relocation to the cloud has fueled security and privacy concerns as users' data leave owner's protection sphere and enter the cloud. Significant efforts have been devoted by academia and research community to study and build secure frameworks in cloud environment, but there exists a research gap for comprehensive study of security frameworks in mobile cloud computing environment. Therefore, we aim to conduct a comprehensive survey to analyze various cryptographic, biometric and multifactor lightweight solutions for data security in mobile cloud. This survey highlights the current security issues in mobile cloud environment and infrastructure, investigates various data security frameworks and provides a taxonomy of the state-of-the-art data security frameworks and deep insight into open research issues for ensuring security and privacy of data in mobile cloud computing platform.