Abstract

Mobile computing is fast replacing the traditional computing paradigms by offering its users to exploit portable computations and context-aware communications. Despite the benefits of mobile computing, such as portability and context-sensitivity, there are some critical challenges, such as resource poverty of mobile devices and security of mobile user’s data that must be addressed. Implementing the security mechanisms to execute on mobile devices can be challenging as mobile devices lack the required processor, memory and battery resources to support continuous and long-term execution of computation intensive tasks. Cloud computing model can provide virtually unlimited hardware, software, and service resources to compensate for the resource poverty of mobile devices. In recent years, there is a lot of research and development of solutions and frameworks that preserve the security and privacy of mobile devices and their data. However, there has been little effort to secure mobile devices while also supporting an efficient utilization of the limited resources available on mobile devices. In this paper, we propose Security as a Service for mobile devices (SeaaS for mobile) that integrates mobile computing and cloud computing technologies to secure the critical resources of mobile devices. The proposed solution aims to support 1) security for the data critical resources of mobile devices, and 2) security as a service by cloud servers for an efficient utilization of the mobile device resources. We demonstrate the security as a service based on a practical scenario for the security of mobile devices. The evaluation results show that the proposed solution is 1) accurate to detect the potential security threats, and is 2) computationally efficient for mobile devices. The proposed solution as part of ongoing research provides the foundations to develop a framework to address SeaaS for mobile. The proposed solution aims to advance the research state-of-the-art on software engineering, mobile cloud computing, while it specifically focuses exploiting cloud-based services to secure mobile devices.

Highlights

  • Mobile computing has fast emerged as a pervasive technology that empowers its users to exploit portability and context-awareness to perform a variety of tasks on the go [1]

  • Proposed Solution, Contributions, and Assumptions We propose to address the security related issues that are relevant to the critical resources of mobile devices by integrating the mobile computing and cloud computing technologies

  • To uniquely identify a device‟s hardware, the device-specific information of a mobile device is represented with Unique Device Identifier (UDID) or International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) that are subject to security threats

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

Mobile computing has fast emerged as a pervasive technology that empowers its users to exploit portability and context-awareness to perform a variety of tasks on the go [1]. The mobile users can enable GPS based location sensing to get live updates about traffic conditions or recommendations about the places/events of interest based on their geographical proximity Despite these benefits, mobile computing in general and mobile devices in particular face two primary challenges [8], [9]. A third part game installed on a mobile device can try to maliciously access the Microphone to spy on user‟s voice conversation or look into user‟s contact list for information [3] If such private information can be compromised or exploited by entities with malicious access, it can put user‟s information and device‟s data on security risk [14]

Research Challenges
BACKGROUND
Mobile Server
Network Connectivity
RELATED RESEARCH ON SECURE MOBILE COMPUTING
Summary of Existing Research on Security for Mobile Computing Environments
Summary of Frameworks and Tools for Mobile Computing Security
A LAYERED SOLUTION FOR SECURITY AS A SERVICE FOR MOBILE COMPUTING
Layer I - Security Critical Mobile Computing Layer
Demonstration of the Security as a Service Framework
Results of Preliminary Evaluations
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
Possible Future Research
Full Text
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