Mobile cloud computing models security issues: A systematic review

Abstract

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is a trending technology employed in several domains to overcome the limitations of mobile devices by using cloud capabilities. Communication between mobile devices and clouds is maintained via wireless media to make use of cloud services. Hence, MCC models show vital security issues related to many disciplines, especially authentication, privacy, and trust. Current MCC models lack the ability to secure and protect data, resources, communication channels, and authentication (client-to-cloud and cloud-to-client). MCC security issues have appeared mainly as a result of the integration between mobile devices and cloud computing. MCC issues represent critical challenges that must be addressed by model developers and practitioners. Enormous models have been proposed to enhance mobile cloud computing security issues, which makes it essential to systematically review and analyze them. In this paper, 73 relevant papers are systemically reviewed, among which 34 different models are analyzed against the known security issues that were either inherited from mobile and cloud computing technologies or emerged as a result of this integration. This study showed that (i) cloud-to-client authentication issues are disregarded by existing MCC models, (ii) existing MCC models tend to address some but not all security issues, and (iii) related MCC model surveys do not sufficiently address comprehensive MCC security issues (in each survey) such as securing and protecting data, resources, and communication channels. This paper provides an important resource regarding MCC security issues for model developers and practitioners for future research and designs.