An Architecture for Providing Context-Aware Security as a Service in Mobile Cloud Computing Environments

摘要

Security and privacy issues are becoming more important and relevant in today’s Mobile Cloud Computing environments, particularly to enterprises users, who are using the cloud-powered mobile devices to help them carry out their daily tasks. The security and privacy issues forthese users and devices have become among the top issues that enterprises face especially with the emerging trends such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), whereby users are allowed to bring their preferred mobile devices to work. Such environments tend to be heterogeneous, dynamic and fast changing;raising a lot of challenges for enterprises to keep their devices and confidential data protected. This concept paper proposes a security architecture whereby the context awareness features of mobile devices and the flexibility and scalability of cloud computing are utilized to provide a novelscheme for providing Context-aware Security as a Service (CA-SecaaS) to enhance the security of MCC. Using CA-SecaaS (currently under a pilot study for a commercial enterprise), enterprises and developers will be able to enhance their applications with context-aware security features withminimum time, cost and effort by offloading the context-aware security decisions to the cloud.