Security as a Service in Cloud for Smartphones

Abstract: Smartphone usage has been continuously growing in recent times. Smartphones offer Personal Computer (PC) functionality to the end user, hence they are vulnerable to the same sorts of security threats as desktop computers. Cloud computing is a new computing paradigm and a breakthrough technology of recent times. Its growing popularity can be attributed to its ability to transform computing to a utility, scalability, and cost effectiveness. More and more services are predicted to be offered in the cloud in the near future. Due to the resource constraints of smartphones, security services in the form of a cloud offering seems to be a natural fit (as the services could be provided in a very scalable form in the cloud while off-loading the smartphone). This project proposes a generic architecture for providing security services in the cloud for smartphones. To enable the design of this architecture, it is essential to analyze and identify possible security solutions that could be provided as a cloud service to the smartphone. Security requirements of smartphones have been analysed considering the various infection channels for smartphones, attacks and threats encountered in a smartphone environment, smartphone usage scenarios and the smartphone‟slimitations. Next, the security functions that must be implemented in the smartphone to overcome these threats are identified. Furthermore, a review of the existing architectures for mobile computing are presented and their security issues are examined. A detailed study of the analysed results has been used to build the architecture for offering security services to smartphones in the cloud, targeted use case scenario being the usage in a corporate environment. The functions to be handled by each of the components of the architecture have been specified. Furthermore, the proposed architecture has been examined to prove its feasibility by analysing it in terms of its security aspects, scalability and flexibility. Additionally, experiments to understand the performance enhancement by offering security services in the cloud for smartphones have been performed. This has been done by measuring the resource consumption of anti-virus software in a smartphone and performing the same measurement in an emulated smartphone in the cloud.