Enhancing Security of Mobile Cloud Computing by Trust- and Role-Based Access Control

Abstract

The tremendous development in mobile technology attracts users’ attention. Thus, the users are shifting from traditional computational devices to smartphones and tablets, and because of that, mobile devices have anticipated most of the global IP traffic. However, mobile device’s resource-constrained behaviour cannot handle the heavy computational load. Mobile cloud computing (MCC) mitigates resource-constrained issues by enabling computing resources with minimal effort. However, providing security in MCC is an obstacle due to users’ uncertain and dynamic behaviour and the explosion of online computerized data. Providing security, confidentiality, and authentication is not enough in MCC; therefore, the users need authorization. Thus, the paper designs an access control mechanism by computing the trust based on the user’s uncertain behaviour. This mechanism mitigates the malicious actions caused by authenticated users. Performance results indicate that the access control mechanism accurately detects and mitigates malicious users from the MCC environment.