Mobile Cloud Computing and Security Challenges

There is a lot of confusion in the IT communities regarding how cloud technology differs from the existing model and how the difference affects its adoption.Some consider cloud as new technical revolution while some sees it as a natural evolution of technology, culture and economy.However, cloud computing is an indispensable model with the possibility of reducing cost through optimization and increased operating and economic efficiencies.More so, cloud computing could enhance collaboration and agility significantly.However, security, privacy and trust remain the major concern posing various challenges to its adoption.Thus, this potential model would be a failure without an appropriate design of security and privacy apparatus that can secure cloud arena thereby, giving the potential users the confidence to embrace cloud computing.This paper, however, explains issues of cloud computing that pose various challenges to it security and privacy.It also illustrates various approaches to address these challenges. Literature ReviewIn case of the cloud computing domain, users mainly use cloud Services through a Web-based user interface (WBI), either a web browser or a mobile application, or a Web service application programming interface (API).Authentication is a way to provide secure access to users who are known as authorized users only.Simple text password is the widely used authentication system.Many researches have been carried out on the matter of improvement about the level of mobile cloud security.This has been treated as one of the major challenges.Handwriting recognition system has been proposed by Omri et al. [1] to uniquely identify password and unique handwriting style.Two implementation ways (web base and mobile application) have been used to set-up the connection between the mobile phone as a biometriccapture device.This method also uses Hadoop to set up the connection.Rassan et al. [10] has proposed another popular method based on finger print scan.Quick response code (QR code) based user authentication system for mobile based cloud has been proposed by [2] where conversion of the user ID, password, and the user's image to QR Code is made.Multiple level of password authentication is being done here.Access to the cloud is allowed if authentication is successful in all levels. First level also known organization level.The organization password is being read at this level.Without authentication the connection tends to be terminated.After authentication it goes to the second level. Second level also known as the team level.As this level, team password is being read.After this it goes to user-level authentication. Third level provides the user privileges and permission.An extension of Yang and Chang [4] proposed by Chen, et al. [3] in the year of 2011 by incorporating password protection-based mechanism with dynamic ID Background And Related WorkCloud and mobile cloud computing are discussed under this section.The related research work in MCC are also highlighted. Definition and FeaturesAccording to the defines it as follows: Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, ondemand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service