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Abstract: Cloud computing is one of the latest developments in the IT industry. It is an emerging technology paradigm that migrates current technological and computing concepts into utility-like solutions similar to electricity and water systems. In addition, with the popularity of mobile devices and mobile computing and their integration with cloud computing we end up with a new IT paradigm called Mobile Cloud Computing. In this paradigm, cloud computing provides the infrastructure, platform, and software services to mobile users through mobile devices and mobile networks. Mobile Cloud Computing offers a wide range of benefits including configurable computing resources, economic savings, and service flexibility. However, the full use and adoption of this new IT paradigm is hindered by numerous new security and privacy issues and concerns. In this paper we will investigate, review, and discuss the new security issues introduced by the use of mobile cloud computing, profoundly analyzing the security issues from three different aspects: mobile devices, wireless networks, and cloud infrastructure.
Keywords: mobile cloud computing security, mobile devices security, cloud computing security, mobile cloud computing
1. Introduction
As a result of the popularity of mobile devices and mobile computing and their integration with cloud computing, a new IT paradigm called Mobile Cloud Computing has emerged. This has gain momentum when cloud computing starts offering infrastructure, platform, and software services to mobile users. Although this new paradigm has a wide range of benefits such as configurable computing resources, economic savings, and service flexibility, its full scale use and adoption is hindered by the emergence of new types of security issues and privacy risks and concerns that must be fully recognized and addressed. These new security and privacy risks are introduced by the use of mobile devices, mobile networks, and the cloud infrastructure and environment. Mobile cloud computing users have the ability to work from anywhere without being bound to any networking system. This flexibility extends the network boundary beyond a fixed point and makes security management a much more difficult task, as the users cannot be tracked down to a single location. Therefore, the implicit presumption that everything inside the company's network's firewall is secure turns out to be not true anymore (Leugna 2007). Mobile communication takes place mainly through the radio signals...