With the development of cloud computing and mobility, mobile cloud computing has emerged and become a focus of research. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) integrates mobile computing and cloud computing aiming to extend mobile devices capabilities. By the means of on-demand self-service and extendibility, it can offer the infrastructure, platform, and software services in a cloud to mobile users through the mobile network. There is huge market for mobile based e-Commerce applications across the globe. Security and privacy are the key issues for mobile cloud computing applications. The limited processing power and memory of a mobile device dependent on inherently unreliable wireless channel for communication and battery for power leaves little scope for a reliable security layer. Thus there is a need for a lightweight secure framework that provides security with minimum communication and processing overhead on mobile devices. The security and privacy protection services can be achieved with the help of secure mobile-cloud application services.
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Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) integrates mobile computing and cloud computing aiming to extend mobile devices capabilities. By the means of on-demand self-service and extendibility, it can offer the infrastructure, platform, and software services in a cloud to mobile users through the mobile network.
There is huge market for mobile based e-Commerce applications across the globe. Security and privacy are the key issues for mobile cloud computing applications. The limited processing power and memory of a mobile device dependent on inherently unreliable wireless channel for communication and battery for power leaves little scope for a reliable security layer. Thus there is a need for a lightweight secure framework that provides security with minimum communication and processing overhead on mobile devices. The security and privacy protection services can be achieved with the help of secure mobile-cloud application services. There are many frameworks and models suggested by different researcher in concern with privacy and security. However, there is still plenty of scope for improvement. Taking support from a proximate cloud a security service could be devised for a mobile device which works as an interface and adaptively provides optimum security solutions based on communication channel capacity, available system resources both hardware and software and user-defined parameters (Dinh 2011).
Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the combination of cloud computing, mobile computing and wireless networks to bring rich computational resources to mobile users, network operators, as well as cloud computing providers. The ultimate goal of MCC is to enable execution of rich mobile applications on a plethora of mobile devices, with a rich user experience. MCC provides business opportunities for mobile network operators as well as cloud providers.
MCC can be defined as a rich mobile computing technology that leverages unified elastic resources of varied clouds and network technologies toward unrestricted functionality, storage, and mobility to serve a multitude of mobile devices anywhere, anytime through the channel of Ethernet or Internet regardless of heterogeneous environments and platforms based on the pay as you use principle. Mobile Cloud Computing refers to an infrastructure where both the data storage and the data processing occur outside of the mobile device. Mobile cloud applications move the computing power and data storage away from mobile phones and into the cloud, bringing applications and mobile computing not only to smart phone users but also to a much broader range of mobile subscribers (Zissis and Lekkas 2012).
Mobile devices are increasingly becoming an essential part of human life as the most effective and convenient communication tools not bounded by time and place. Mobile users accumulate rich experience of various services from mobile applications, which run on the devices and/or on remote servers via wireless networks. The rapid progress of mobile computing becomes a powerful trend in the development of IT technology as well as commerce and industry fields. However, the mobile devices are facing many challenges in their resources and communications. The limited resources significantly impede the improvement of service qualities (Fernando 2013).
There are so many cloud storage service providers around e.g. One Drive (Microsoft Corporation), Dropbox (Dropbox Inc), Google Drive (Google Inc), Box, Amazon Cloud Drive and Apple icloud. Cloud computing applications are the cloud-based services e.g. Mobile Email, Google Maps, Google Cloud Print (Google Inc), Other Apps (Real Estate, Insurance, Surveying, Navigation app) (Ranbijay Kumar and Rajalakshmi 2013). Recently, the mobile cloud computing is becoming a new hot technology. And the security solution for it has become a research focus. With the development of the mobile cloud computing, new security issues will happen, which needs more security approaches.