Special issue on security and privacy techniques in mobile cloud computing

Abstract

Mobile cloud computing is the combination of cloud computing and mobile network which benefits the users, network operators, and cloud service providers. There are numerous challenges in the field of mobile cloud computing, including reliability, authenticity and privacy (Tunc and Hariri 2015;Vazquez et al. 2015). These challenges have become a barrier in the rapid growth of mobile cloud computing's subscriber. Without authenticity, any trust relationship could not be established in the mobile cloud computing system, and any attacker cloud can cheat through disguise; without reliability and privacy, mobile users would also increase the risk of outsourcing tasks to the cloud service providers.Besides the security requirement (reliability, authenticity and privacy), efficiency is the other concern specific to the mobile cloud computing. Due to the constraint over the resources of mobile devices, it is always desired to offload the data and the computations to the cloud service providers; such that the local computations are minimized. This outsourcing paradigm raises a new challenge for carrying data inside the mobile devices as well as for the privacy of outsourced identities.This special issue aims to bring together the researchers for the exchange of the state-of-art results in advancement of technologies towards the secure mobile cloud computing. Especially, it focuses on both the theoretical and the practical aspects of the security issues in mobile cloud computing. In this special issue, a total of ten papers were selected after a rigorous review process. These papers addressed the security and privacy issues in cloud computing and proposed efficient solutions for these problems.The first paper entitled ''Dynamic Proofs of Retrievability with Square-Root Oblivious RAM'' by Xu et al. (2015) pointed out that the security challenges, such as efficient checking and proving of data integrity, need to be more considered for cloud storage. In this paper, the authors proposed dynamic proofs of retrievability via Square-Root Oblivious RAM. They first defined the notions in their scheme, followed by introducing the Square-Root ORAM protocol. It was shown from the security and efficiency analysis that the proposed scheme is efficient in supporting data dynamics with provable verification and retrievability.The next paper entitled ''Unidirectional IBPRE Scheme from Lattice for Cloud Computation'' by Zhang et al. (2015a) proposed a property of backward collusion safety, which meant that the collusion between Alice and the proxy cannot extract secret key of Bob. The authors presented an IB-PRE scheme based on lattices with the highly desirable properties of anonymity, uni-directionality, multi-use and backward collusion safety. Besides this, the IND-PrID-CPA security proof of the proposed approach is given using the random oracle model based on the assumptions of the decisional learning with errors (LWE) hardness.The particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is a reasonable method for solving complex functions. However,...