STRENGTHENING THE SECURITY OF MOBILE CLOUD COMPUTING USING HYBRID AUTHENTICATION TECHNIQUES

Abstract

The mobile cloud computing has become a popular business transaction platform today because modern mobile sets are not used just for making calls and sending messages. They are increasingly being used in mobile cloud computing (MCC) to store sensitive and critical information as well as to access sensitive data using the Internet via cloud service provider (CSP). The majority of these devices use inherently weak authentication mechanisms, based upon passwords and personal identification numbers (PINs). But it is not secure way for authenticating users and also it is difficult to confirm that the demand is from the rightful owner. Authentication is one of the main security problems in mobile cloud computing. This study focus on strengthening user authentication in the mobile cloud computing and proposes new authentication security architecture as well as develop a new hybrid authentication on the mobile cloud environments. The design science approach is applied in this study to assess the recent work on the area of data security related to mobile cloud computing, authentication security issues and solutions and reference architectures; and proposed a secured hybrid authentication technique for the mobile cloud computing environment. The evaluation indicates that the proposed strengthening security of mobile cloud computing using a hybrid authentication technique is more secure. The evaluation result shows that using a combination of username/password and fingerprint authentication is a viable option for strengthening user authentication on the mobile cloud computing environment.