Data Security Frameworks for Mobile Cloud Computing: A Comprehensive Review of the Literature

Using a mobile Internet connection, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) customers can access the powerful computational and storage resources made available by MCC service providers. However, the MCC environment is open to security attacks, especially at the more exposed mobile device (MD) end, as the low resourced MD may not be able to implement sufficiently advanced security protection mechanisms. A number of security frameworks addressing MCC data security issues have been proposed in the extant literature. This paper reviews a selection of MCC data security frameworks and identifies challenges and directions for further work. These include the development of an MCC data protection framework that provides a comprehensive protection against the threat spectrum and across all layers of the MCC infrastructure, by adequately addressing the fundamental security requirements.