Virtualization-based security techniques on mobile cloud computing: Research gaps and challenges

Abstract

The principle constraints of mobile devices are their limited resources such as processing capability, storage space and battery life. While cloud computing offers a vast computing resources services. A new idea emerged by including the cloud computing into mobile devices to augment the capacities of the mobile devices resources such as smartphones, tablet, and other personal digital assistant (PDA) which provides a robust technology called Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC). Although MCC have brought many advantages for the mobile users, it also stills suffer from security and privacy side of data while hosted on virtual machines (VM) on remote cloud's servers. Currently, the eyes of the security expert's community turned towards the virtualization-based security technique either on the Cloud or on the mobile devices. The new challenge is to develop secure methods in order to authenticate high sensitive digital content. This paper investigates the main challenges regarding the security and privacy issues in mobile cloud exactly focusing on the virtualization issue layer and give clear strengths and weaknesses of recent relevant virtualization security techniques existing in the literature. Hence, the paper provides perspectives for researchers in order to achieve as a future work.