How to Dynamically Protect Data in Mobile Cloud Computing?

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is introduced as a supporting architecture for mitigating the resources and energy limitations of mobile devices. And security is considered as a key factor which significantly affects MCC’s widely deployment. Thus data protection methods such as encryption were applied to ensure the security of data. However, the complexity increased by data protection methods brings down the performance of transaction processing in MCC. In order to reduce the hurts brought to users’ satisfactory by data protection methods, we firstly carried out some experiments based on the Hadoop cloud computing platform for quantitative analysis. We used the two popular encryption algorithms DES and AES(512), simulated the transaction processing, measured the time consumption, and logged the battery voltage change of mobile terminals. Results show that data protection methods have significance effects on the efficiency of transaction processing and the energy consumption of mobile devices. Furthermore, the degree of these effects is closely related to the complexity of protection methods. Based on the analysis, this paper proposed a framework for dynamic data protection, expecting to balance the security and resource consumption in MCC.