Security frameworks for mobile cloud computing: A survey

Abstract

Cloud Computing is the long envisaged vision of computing as a utility. Innovative advances in hardware, networking, middleware, and virtual machine technologies have led to an emergence of new, globally distributed computing platforms, namely cloud computing. Cloud Computing provides computation facilities and storage as services accessible from anywhere via the Internet without investing in new infrastructure, training, or software licensing. In other words, Cloud Computing is a way to increase the capacity or add capabilities dynamically. The main advantage of Cloud Computing is that users only utilize what they require and only pay for what they really use. With an exponential growth of the mobile applications and evolution of cloud computing concept, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) has been presented as a potential technology for mobile services. MCC incorporates the cloud computing into the mobile environment. Mobile Cloud Computing refers to an infrastructure where data processing and storage can happen away from mobile device. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) has transformed the way in which mobile users across the globe leverage services on the go. The obstacles related to performance (e.g. battery life, storage, and bandwidth), environment (e.g. heterogeneity, scalability, availability) and security (e.g. reliability and privacy) are overcome by integrating cloud computing into the mobile environment using MCC. Mobile cloud is a service model, where a mobile device can use the cloud for information storage, searching, data mining and multimedia processing. Cloud Computing technology also brings forth many new challenges for data security and access control when users store sensitive data on cloud servers. As the users no longer have physical possession of the outsourced data, makes the data integrity, privacy and authenticity protection in Cloud Computing a very challenging and potentially difficult task. Though the Cloud Computing benefits are clear, surrendering physical possession of user data, inevitably poses new security risks. In this paper, we discuss Mobile Cloud Computing Security frameworks found in the literature related to Cloud Computing and its environment.