Mobile Cloud Computing: Architecture, Advantages and Security Issues

In the last few years, Mobile Cloud Computing has become an emerging area of research due to the important developments in mobile networks and Cloud Computing. Computing power and data storage are being moved away from mobile devices to be performed on Cloud servers in order to overcome mobile devices' limitations. In spite of this development, it still faces many challenges namely low bandwidth, energy consumption, and especially security threat. Furthermore, the nature of mobile devices and their operating systems make Mobile Cloud systems more susceptible to malicious attacks and the distributed storage in the Cloud may cause privacy issues. Security and privacy are being then arguably challenged facing its embracement. This paper overviews the Mobile Cloud Computing environment and systems. We focus on the main security issues related to the mobile device, networks and Cloud Computing.