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Pirax: framework for application piracy control in mobile cloud environment

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Abstract

Mobile cloud computing is an emerging technology that is gaining popularity as a means to extend the capabilities of resource-constrained mobile devices such as a smartphone. Mobile cloud computing requires specialized application development models that support computation offloading from a mobile device to the cloud. The computation offloading is performed by means of offloading application process, application component, entire application, or clone of the smartphone. The offloading of an entire application or clone of the smartphone to cloud may raise application piracy issues, which, unfortunately, have not been addressed in the existing literature. This paper presents a piracy control framework for mobile cloud environment, named Pirax, which prevents mobile applications from executing on unauthenticated devices and cloud resources. Pirax is formally verified using High Level Petri Nets, Satisfiability Modulo Theories Library and Z3 solver. Pirax is implemented on Android platform and analyzed from security and performance perspectives. The performance analysis results show that Pirax is lightweight and easy to integrate into existing mobile cloud application development models.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded in part by BrightSparks and Peruntukan Penyelidikan Pascasiswazah (PPP) (Grant No: PG122-2012B), University of Malaya, Malaysia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

    Atta ur Rehman Khan, Mazliza Othman & Abdul Nasir Khan

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Dakota State University, Fargo, USA

    Mazhar Ali

  3. Department of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Abbottabad, Pakistan

    Sajjad Ahmad Madani

Authors
  1. Atta ur Rehman Khan
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  2. Mazliza Othman
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  3. Mazhar Ali
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  4. Abdul Nasir Khan
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  5. Sajjad Ahmad Madani
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Correspondence to Atta ur Rehman Khan.

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Khan, A.R., Othman, M., Ali, M. et al. Pirax: framework for application piracy control in mobile cloud environment. J Supercomput 68, 753–776 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-013-1061-1

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