Security frameworks in mobile cloud computing

Abstract

The concept of mobile cloud computing (MCC) combines mobile computing with cloud resources, and therefore, has opened up new directions in the field of mobile computing. Cloud resources can help in overcoming the memory, energy, and other computing resource limitations of mobile devices. Thus, the mobile cloud computing applications can address some of the resource constraint issues by offloading tasks to cloud servers. Despite these advantages, mobile cloud computing is still not widely adopted due to various challenges associated with security in mobile cloud computing framework including issues of privacy, access control, service level agreements, interoperability, charging model, etc. In this chapter, we focus on the challenges associated with security in mobile cloud computing, and key features required in a security framework for MCC. Initially, we describe key architectures pertaining to various applications of mobile cloud computing, and later, we discuss few security frameworks proposed for MCC in terms of handling privacy, security, and attacks.