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The emerging area of mobile cloud computing will influence the future of varied applications, such as electronic commerce and health informatics. It is expected to rise in popularity over other models in cloud computing. This is facilitated by its simplicity, accessibility and ease of use. With mobile cloud computing, resource-constrained mobile devices could capitalize on the computation/storage resources of cloud servers via communication networks. Despite the advantage of this innovative computing model, mobile devices in mobile cloud computing are open to more security risks because they often have to access cloud servers through untrusted networks from different locations. Therefore, security is a critical problem to be tackled in mobile cloud computing. One of the most important aspects of mobile cloud computing security is to establish authenticated communication sessions between mobile devices and cloud servers. In this paper, we present a novel authentication scheme, Message Digest-based Authentication (MDA). Technically, MDA strategically incorporates hashing, in addition to traditional user ID and passwords, to achieve mutual authentication. The effectiveness of MDA is validated with Scyther, a widely-used security protocol analyzer. Our experimental results indicate that MDA is capable of withstanding a variety of different security attacks, such as man-in-the-middle, replay attacks, etc.

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Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become a significant part of surveillance techniques. With unequal clustering approaches and multi-hop communication, WSNs can balance energy among the clusters and serve a wide monitoring area. Recent research has shown significant improvements in unequal clustering approaches by forming clusters prior to the selection of cluster heads. These improvements adopt different geometric fractals, such as the Sierpinski triangle, to divide the monitoring area into multiple clusters. However, performance of such approaches can be improved further by cognitive partitioning of the monitoring area instead of adopting random fractals. This paper proposes a novel clustering approach that partitions the monitoring area in a cognitive way for balancing the energy consumption. In addition, the proposed approach adopts a two-layered scrutinization process for the selection of cluster heads that ensures minimum energy consumption from the network. Furthermore, it reduces the blind spot problem that escalates once the nodes start dying. The proposed approach has been tested in terms of number of alive nodes per round, energy consumption of nodes and clusters, and distribution of alive nodes in the network. Results show a significant improvement in balancing the energy consumption among clusters and a reduction in the blind spot problem.

The security of data transmission is of paramount importance to mobile cloud computing. For security purposes, the data transmission in mobile cloud computing typically requires a mutually-authenticated environment for mobile devices and cloud servers. SSH (secure shell) could be used to satisfy the requirement. However, it makes the authentication process computationally expensive for mobile devices because it involves public key cryptosystem and mobile devices are relatively restricted in terms of computation capacity. This places the onus of establishing and maintaining secure communication sessions on the resourceful cloud servers. We propose a novel mutual authentication scheme, "Message Digest and Location based Authentication (MDLA)", which involves symmetric key operations. In addition to computational simplicity, MDLA achieves integrity through message digest, and ensures the unpredictability of keys using location vector and timestamp.