Special issue on security and privacy techniques in mobile cloud computing
Special issue on security and privacy techniques in mobile cloud computing
Ilsun You 0
Jin Li 0
0 Guangzhou University , Guangzhou , People's Republic of China
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Mobile cloud computing is the combination of cloud
computing and mobile network which benefits the users,
network operators, and cloud service providers. There are
numerous challenges in the field of mobile cloud
computing, including reliability, authenticity and privacy
(Tunc
and Hariri 2015; Vazquez et al. 2015)
. These challenges
have become a barrier in the rapid growth of mobile cloud
computing’s subscriber. Without authenticity, any trust
relationship could not be established in the mobile cloud
computing system, and any attacker cloud can cheat
through disguise; without reliability and privacy, mobile
users would also increase the risk of outsourcing tasks to
the cloud service providers.
Besides the security requirement (reliability,
authenticity and privacy), efficiency is the other concern specific to
the mobile cloud computing. Due to the constraint over the
resources of mobile devices, it is always desired to offload
the data and the computations to the cloud service
providers; such that the local computations are minimized. This
outsourcing paradigm raises a new challenge for carrying
data inside the mobile devices as well as for the privacy of
outsourced identities.
This special issue aims to bring together the researchers
for the exchange of the state-of-art results in advancement
of technologies towards the secure mobile cloud
Department of Information Security Engineering,
Soonchunhyang University, Asan, South Korea
computing. Especially, it focuses on both the theoretical
and the practical aspects of the security issues in mobile
cloud computing. In this special issue, a total of ten papers
were selected after a rigorous review process. These papers
addressed the security and privacy issues in cloud
computing and proposed efficient solutions for these problems.
The first paper entitled ‘‘Dynamic Proofs of
Retrievability with Square-Root Oblivious RAM’’ by
Xu et al.
(2015)
pointed out that the security challenges, such as
efficient checking and proving of data integrity, need to be
more considered for cloud storage. In this paper, the
authors proposed dynamic proofs of retrievability via
Square-Root Oblivious RAM. They first defined the
notions in their scheme, followed by introducing the
Square-Root ORAM protocol. It was shown from the
security and efficiency analysis that the proposed scheme is
efficient in supporting data dynamics with provable
verification and retrievability.
The next paper entitled ‘‘Unidirectional IBPRE
Scheme from Lattice for Cloud Computation’’ by
Zhang
et al. (2015
a) proposed a property of backward collusion
safety, which meant that the collusion between Alice and
the proxy cannot extract secret key of Bob. The authors
presented an IB-PRE scheme based on lattices with the
highly desirable properties of anonymity,
uni-directionality, multi-use and backward collusion safety. Besides this,
the IND-PrID-CPA security proof of the proposed
approach is given using the random oracle model based on
the assumptions of the decisional learning with errors
(LWE) hardness.
The particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is a
reasonable method for solving complex functions.
However, this algorithm can easily fall into local minimum
points and has a slow convergence speed. Using an
established ontology model, the third paper entitled
‘‘Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm Based on
Ontology Model to Support Cloud Computing
Applications’’ by
Zhang et al. (2015
b) proposed a framework and
two novel PSO algorithms. The ontology model is
introduced with various types of operators to the cooperation
framework. In contrast with the traditional algorithms, the
proposed algorithms include semantic roles and concepts to
update crucial parameters based on the cooperation
framework. Using function optimization problems as
examples, the experiments show that the particle swarm
algorithms within their framework are superior to other
classical algorithms.
The fourth paper entitled ‘‘Multi-segment and
Multistage Projected Tetrahedra’’ by
Li and Liu (2015)
presented an approach which partitions datasets into multiple
segments in space, and divided the visualizing procedure
into multiple stages in time. Multiple segments help sorting
in parallel without write access violations, while multiple
stages can satisfy different requirements and increase
users’ cognition. Cloud computing can help this process
because the datasets are large and the sorting is complex.
The fifth paper entitled ‘‘Security Framework for
RESTful mobile cloud computing Web Services’’ by
Alshahwan et al. (2015
) investigated the security aspects of
a system for complex mobile Web service provisioning.
The authors characterized the security requirements of the
individual components, and presented a security
framework which provides authentication (...truncated)