Feasibility of Deploying Biometric Encryption in Mobile Cloud Computing

Biometric Encryption (BE) is a new issue in the information security field which is based on biometric identification and cryptosystems and it will be a key research subject in the future. At the same time the development of cloud computing is not restricted to PC anymore, some cloud computing services for mobile terminals such as cell phones have already appeared due to the booming of mobile internet. However, security problems still exists in mobile cloud computing (MCC) inherited from cloud computing and mechanisms are needed to cope with these problems. In this paper, we examine various aspects of using BE in MCC to solve security problems: first, we describe the background and related work of BE and MCC, and second we demonstrate several scenarios of deploying BE in MCC. Specifically, we analyze the new critical issues in these situations that can be used by an adversary to disable the operation of cloud computing environment. We then discuss different BE methods that applying in MCC, and explore scenarios where each method shows its strengths and weaknesses. In particular, we address the problem of using BE to protect privacy for users in MCC. Further, we propose an advanced protocol that employ BE for transferring private data in cloud computing environment, and design a conceptual cloud platform supporting biometric authentication to serve as future data center.