Enhancing Security in Mobile Cloud Computing: An Analysis of Authentication Protocols and Innovation

Mobile Cloud Computing is a combination of Mobile Computing, Cloud Computing and wireless networks to convey rich computational resources to mobile users, network operators, as well as cloud computing providers. Nowadays, the market of mobile devices and its applications are growing at an alarming speed. In general, single application for a specific purpose is not compatible to different operating systems. So the developer has to develop various versions of application which is compatible to different platforms. In order to overcome the drawback of compatibility and interoperability issues, HTML5-based mobile applications are built by using standard web technologies. HTML5-based mobile applications support same version of application in different platforms, but these applications are vulnerable to attacks because of the data and code being fused together. A new form of Code Injection Attack found in this type of mobile applications inherits the property of XSS attack and also uses many channels to inject malicious code such as Contact, SMS, WIFI, NFC, Barcode etc. This allows the attacker to inject malicious code to exhaust all the resources of the victim. Therefore, security is the major issue which impedes the development of Mobile Cloud Computing. This paper surveys the malicious code injection attacks in Mobile Cloud Computing environment and the possible solutions.

The combination of Mobile computing and Cloud computing gave rise to a new computing paradigm called Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) that gives the flexibility to access information and computing resources anywhere anytime. In many applications, mobile nodes capture images/video clips and exchange with other mobile peers (on demand) and use local access points for efficient smooth distribution of information in the wireless network. In such a situation, a three-way data management and dissemination technique is helpful because it provides both data management and distribution at different levels of granularity. The main motivation of this paper is that we seek a balance between accessing information from a remote cloud server, at the cost of increasing latency, and accessing data from other mobile hosts, at a cost of power, bandwidth and increased traffic. To manage this balance, we propose a layered architecture supported by mobile hosts, access points and cloud together for efficiency. The MCC architecture described in this paper also provides fault tolerance in case one of the mobile nodes fails or gets disconnected. In this paper, we discuss a layered architecture for MCC and present a data pre-distribution scheme for efficient sharing of data among potential users in MCC environment. We also propose update propagation and cache replacement policies in MCC. In addition, we also report complexity analysis for cache accesses by mobile nodes using the proposed architecture in terms of communication messages.

In recent years, mobile networks have faced with the increase of traffic demand. By emerging mobile applications and cloud computing, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) has been introduced. In this research, we focus on the 4th and 5th generation of mobile networks. Data Centers (DCs) are connected to each other by high-speed links in order to minimize delay and energy consumption. By considering a model of the geographical distribution of DCs which uses a wideband optical network, renewable energy and sharing resources for new generations of mobile networks, the real effect of issues on the consumed energy, cost, and profit in the mobile cloud computing are investigated. We derived a penalty function for cost and then by using Lyapunov optimization theorem; we designed an algorithm to minimize the average cost of energy consumption based on the online information in MCC. The time average cost is at most O(1/V) above the optimum target, while the average queue size is O(V). The parameter V can be tuned to make the time average cost as close to (or below) the optimum as desired. We designed three scenarios and two classes of applications to set up our simulation environment. The provided results illustrate the efficiency of our proposed scheme and validate the mathematical model.

In mobile cloud computing systems, cloud computing has a significant impact on wireless networks. Cloud computing and wireless networks have traditionally been addressed separately in the literature. In this paper, we jointly study the operations of cloud computing and wireless networks in mobile computing environments, where the objective is to improve the end-to-end performances of cloud mobile media delivered through mobile cloud computing systems. Unlike most existing studies on wireless networks, where only the spectrum efficiency is considered, we consider not only the spectrum efficiency in wireless networks but also the pricing information in the cloud, based on which power allocation and interference management in the wireless networks are performed. We formulate the problems encountered in the operations of mobile cloud computing environments, including determining the price to charge for media services, resource allocation, and interference management, as a Stackelberg game model. Moreover, we extend this game model with multiple players through network virtualization technology, and adopt the replicator dynamics method to solve the evolutionary game between the different groups of small cells. Furthermore, a backward induction method is used to analyze the proposed Stackelberg game. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) fuels innovation in Mobile Computing and opens new pathways between mobile devices and infrastructures. There are several issues in MCC environment as it integrates various technologies. Among all issues, security lies on the top where many users are not willing to adopt the cloud services. This paper focuses on the authentication. The objective of this paper is to provide a mechanism for authenticating all the entities involved in accessing the cloud services. A mechanism called Key Based Mutual Authentication (KBMA) is proposed which is divided into two processes namely registration and authentication. Registration is a one-time process where the users are registered for accessing the cloud services by giving the desired unique information. Authentication process is carried out mutually to verify the identities of Device and Cloud Service Provider (CSP). Scyther tool is used for analysing the vulnerability in terms of attacks. The result claims show that the proposed mechanism is resilient against various attacks.

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is the availability of cloud computing services in a mobile environment. By providing optimal services for mobile users, MCC incorporates the elements of mobile networks and cloud computing. In mobile cloud computing, all the data and complicated computing modules can be processed in clouds, and mobile devices do not need a powerful configuration like CPU speed, memory capacity, etc. However, the mobile devices are facing up with many struggles in their resources (e.g., battery life, storage, and bandwidth) and communications (e.g., privacy, mobility, and security). These challenges have a significant effect on the improvement of service qualities. In this paper, a literature survey on the MCC and security issues in MCC has presented.

With the proliferation of new mobile devices, mobile cloud computing technology has emerged to provide rich computing and storage functions for mobile users. The explosive growth of mobile data has led to an increased demand for solutions that conserve storage resources. Data deduplication is a promising technique that eliminates data redundancy for storage. For mobile cloud storage services, enabling the deduplication of encrypted data is of vital importance to reduce costs and preserve data confidentiality. However, recently proposed solutions for encrypted deduplication lack the desired level of security and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for serverless efficient encrypted deduplication (SEED) in mobile cloud computing environments. Without the aid of additional servers, SEED ensures confidentiality, data integrity, and collusion resistance for outsourced data. The absence of dedicated servers increases the effectiveness of SEED for mobile cloud storage services, in which user mobility is essential. In addition, noninteractive file encryption with the support of lazy encryption greatly reduces latency in the file-upload process. The proposed indexing structure (D-tree) supports the deduplication algorithm and thus makes SEED much more efficient and scalable. Security and performance analyses prove the efficiency and effectiveness of SEED for mobile cloud storage services.

As the technology is developing with a huge rate, the functionality of smartphone is also getting higher. But the smartphones have some resource constraints like processing power, battery capacity, limited bandwidth for connecting to the Internet, etc. Therefore, to improve the performance of smartphone in terms of processing power, battery and memory, the technology namely, augmented execution is the best solution in the mobile cloud computing (MCC) scenario. Mobile cloud computing works as the combination of mobile computing and cloud computing. Augmented execution alleviates the problem of resource scarcity of smartphone. To get the benefits from the resource-abundant clouds, massive computation intensive tasks are partitioned and migrated to the cloud side for the execution. After executing the task at the cloud side, the results are sent back to the smartphone. This method is called as the computation offloading. The given survey paper focuses on the partitioning techniques in mobile cloud computing.

In order to improve the effect of modern enterprise financial management, this paper improves the mobile cloud computing resource scheduling algorithm under the 5G network architecture. Moreover, this paper introduces mobile edge cloud computing, MEC server, into the financial 5G network system model. Taking into account the possible multihop RSU transmission of the calculation result back, this paper expresses the delay composition of the calculation task on the local execution and offloading to the MEC server in the form of a formula and proposes an offloading strategy based on the MEC load status. On this basis, this paper constructs a mobile cloud computing optimization system under the 5G network architecture and designs experiments to evaluate the performance of the system proposed in this paper. From the experimental research, we can see that the enterprise financial management optimization system based on mobile cloud computing under the 5G network architecture proposed in this paper has good effects in the optimization of corporate financial management.

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is a technique or model, in which mobile applications are built, powered and hosted using cloud computing technology. It refers to the availability of Cloud Computing services in a mobile environment and it is the combination of the heterogeneous fields like mobile phone device, cloud computing and wireless networks. Of all that has been written about cloud computing, precious little attention has been paid to authentication in the cloud. In this paper we have designed a new effective security model for mobile cloud Database as a Service (DBaaS). A user can change his/her password, whenever demanded. Furthermore, security analysis realizes the feasibility of the proposed model for DBaaS and achieves efficiency. We also proposed an efficient authentication scheme to solve the authentication problem in MCC. The proposed solution which we have provided is based mainly on improved Needham-Schroeder’s protocol to prove the users’ identity to determine if this user is authorized or not. The results showed that this scheme is very strong and difficult to break it.

In mobile cloud computing, high energy consumption and service-level agreements (SLAs) violation are the challenging issues considering that the demand for computational power is growing rapidly, which requiring large-scale cloud data centers. The mobile cloud computing enables customers to outsource the large and complex tasks to the cloud data centers for the execution and result generations. To provide resources such as CPU, RAM, memory, and bandwidth cloud data centers host incoming tasks, due to the large data centers that provide the basic resources for the host operations, and it consumes a huge amount of energy, which results in very high operational costs. In order to improve the energy efficiency and SLA violation of a cloud data center, energy-aware methods for overloaded host detection and VM selection from an overloaded host are needed. Cloud computing research community felt the need to provide or improve the energy-efficient solutions that reduce the impact of the issues. In this paper, we have shown many existing algorithm for energy efficiency and SLA violation reduction.

Secure and quality-of-service-supported service-oriented architecture for mobile cloud handoff process

The rapid development of information & communication technology has led to the wide popularity of mobile devices, which have helped to improve business efficiency and enabled simple mobility as small and light devices and convenience of being available anytime, anywhere for cyber-physical-social big data. There are many ongoing studies on mobile cloud computing (MCC) to overcome the limited computing capability and storage capacity and internal battery limitation by taking advantage of the popularity of mobile devices for the processing cyber-physical-social big data. MCC consists of service-oriented architecture, agent-client architecture, and collaborative architecture, with job splitting and allocation as the critical factor. As such, job allocation techniques considering the performance resources of mobile devices have been studied. Note, however, that there is a problem of job reallocation due to continuous battery consumption, since the studies consider only the performance resources of mobile devices at the time of job allocation or take into account the performance resources and remaining battery power only. This paper proposes the job allocation mechanism (JAM) for battery consumption minimization of cyber-physical-social big data processing in MCC, which continuously reflects the battery consumption rate to process jobs with mobile devices only without an external cloud server in a collaborative architecture-based MCC environment. JAM allocates jobs considering the periodic measurement of battery consumption and surplus resource to minimize the problem of job reallocation due to battery rundown of the mobile devices. This paper designs and implements a system for verifying JAM and demonstrated that the job processing speed increased in an MCC environment for cyber-physical-social big data.

Compromise-resilient anonymous mutual authentication scheme for n by m-times ubiquitous mobile cloud computing services

As mobile computing has been developed for decades, a new model for mobile computing, namely, mobile cloud computing, emerges resulting from the marriage of powerful yet affordable mobile devices and cloud computing. In this paper we survey existing mobile cloud computing applications, as well as speculate future generation mobile cloud computing applications. We provide insights for the enabling technologies and challenges that lie ahead for us to move forward from mobile computing to mobile cloud computing for building the next generation mobile cloud applications. For each of the challenges, we provide a survey of existing solutions, identify research gaps, and suggest future research areas.