Paving the Way for Security in Cloud-Based Mobile Augmentation Systems

Despite their steadily increasing capabilities, mobile end-user devices such as smart phones often suffer from reduced processing and storage resources. Cloud-based mobile augmentation (CMA) has recently emerged as a potential solution to this problem. CMA combines concepts of cloud computing and surrogate computing in order to offload resource-intensive tasks to external resources. During the past years, different CMA frameworks have been introduced that enable the development and usage of CMA-based applications. Unfortunately, these frameworks have usually not been designed with security in mind but instead mainly focus on efficient offloading and reintegration mechanisms. Hence, reliance on CMA concepts in security-critical fields of application is currently not advisable. To address this problem, this paper surveys currently available CMA frameworks and assesses their suitability and applicability in security-critical fields of application. For this purpose, relevant security requirements are identified and mapped to the surveyed CMA frameworks. Results obtained from this assessment show that none of the surveyed CMA framework is currently able to meet all relevant security requirements. By identifying security limitations of currently available CMA frameworks, this paper represents a first important step towards development of a secure CMA framework and hence paves the way for a use of CMA-based applications in security-critical fields of application.