Abstract
Mobile computing is fast replacing the traditional computing paradigms by offering its users to exploit portable computations and context-aware communications. Despite the benefits of mobile computing, such as portability and context-sensitivity, there are some critical challenges, such as resource poverty of mobile devices and security of mobile user's data that must be addressed. Implementing the security mechanisms to execute on mobile devices can be challenging as mobile devices lack the required processor, memory and battery resources to support continuous and long-term execution of computation intensive tasks. Cloud computing model can provide virtually unlimited hardware, software, and service resources to compensate for the resource poverty of mobile devices. In recent years, there is a lot of research and development of solutions and frameworks that preserve the security and privacy of mobile devices and their data. However, there has been little effort to secure mobile devices while also supporting an efficient utilization of the limited resources available on mobile devices. In this paper, we propose Security as a Service for mobile devices (SeaaS for mobile) that integrates mobile computing and cloud computing technologies to secure the critical resources of mobile devices. The proposed solution aims to support 1) security for the data critical resources of mobile devices, and 2) security as a service by cloud servers for an efficient utilization of the mobile device resources. We demonstrate the security as a service based on a practical scenario for the security of mobile devices. The evaluation results show that the proposed solution is 1) accurate to detect the potential security threats, and is 2) computationally efficient for mobile devices. The proposed solution as part of ongoing research provides the foundations to develop a framework to address SeaaS for mobile. The proposed solution aims to advance the research state-of-the-art on software engineering, mobile cloud computing, while it specifically focuses exploiting cloud-based services to secure mobile devices.