Security framework for RESTful mobile cloud computing Web services

Providing Web services from the mobile cloud is a current research topic. The mobile cloud provides the computing resources and infrastructure to support the seamless provision of Web services in a lightweight manner. Security has become a major concern with the emergence of mobile cloud Web services. In this paper, we investigate the security aspects of a system for complex mobile Web service provisioning. We characterize the security requirements of the individual components and present a security framework to provide authentication and confidentiality between clients and mobile hosts. Our solution is based on the use of existing security protocols between clients and the mobile hosts as well as a key management protocol between the individual mobile hosts implementing an out-of-band key exchange that is simple in practice, flexible and secure. We examine the performance of this approach by evaluating a prototype implementation of our security framework.