Secure Computational Offloading with gRPC: A Performance Evaluation in a Mobile Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

Computational offloading is a technique commonly indicated to mitigate computational and energy constraints on mobile devices. However, this procedure occurs over a wireless network, an insecure environment, and susceptible to attacks. Currently, one of the main problems related to offloading is how to perform it safely. By acting in conjunction with the TLS protocol, secure gRPC connections ensure the authenticity and integrity of the data transmitted through a network, which provides greater security for distributed applications. In this work, we conducted experiments that evaluated the performance of secure gRPC connections during the computational offloading procedures in a Mobile Cloud Computing scenario. The tests adopted an Android image manipulation application that performs the offloading into a Go or Java process using the multi-language framework gRPC. The results indicated that the adoption of secure gRPC connections saved up to 9 times the processing time and up to 88% of the mobile device's energy consumption compared to local processing.