Privacy & Security of Mobile Cloud Computing

The Indian government, like governments elsewhere in the world, has chosen mobile device as preferred platform to engage with citizens while offering various e-Governance services. Likewise there is huge market for mobile based e-Commerce applications across the globe. However uptake of these services is challenged by the security and privacy concerns of the end user. 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. 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. We plan to explore and experiment with available options to recommend security and privacy enhancing approaches that may meet the security need for mobile application using automated sensing of the context.