Tamper-resistant autonomous agents-based mobile-cloud computing

The rise of the mobile-cloud computing paradigm has enabled mobile devices with limited processing power and battery life to achieve complex tasks in real-time. While mobile-cloud computing is promising to overcome limitations of mobile devices for real-time computing needs, the reliance of existing models on strong assumptions such as the availability of a full clone of the application code and non-standard system environments in the cloud makes it harder to manage the performance of mobile-cloud computing based applications. Furthermore, offloading mobile computation to the cloud entails security risks associated with sending data and code to an untrusted platform and perfect security is hard to achieve due to the extra computational overhead introduced by complex mechanisms. In this paper, we present a dynamic computation-offloading model for mobile-cloud computing, based on autonomous agent-based application partitions. We propose a dynamic tamper-resistance approach for managing the security of offloaded computation, by augmenting agents with self-protection capability using a low-overhead introspection and integrity-preserving communication mechanism. Experiments with a real-world mobile application demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach for high-performance, tamper-resistant mobile-cloud computing.