Security and privacy attacks during data communication in Software Defined Mobile Clouds

Abstract There has been an enormous growth in networking and data communication between the wireless devices. Cloud computation has taken a giant leap into the mobile domain to cater to the on-going communication demands. The latest programming techniques have also paved the way for incorporating Software Defined Networking techniques in Mobile Cloud environment. The growth of networking infrastructure with many such technological innovations, has led to the parallel increase in security and privacy of data at different levels of communication. The communication links and interfaces have become targeted platform for various security attacks causing denial of services. This survey comprehends an in-depth analysis of the possible data privacy attacks and threats in the proposed Software Defined Mobile Cloud. The possibilities of the attacks which are enlisted focus on various ways of spoofing and flooding of data packets, mis-interpretation and aggregation of the flow rules for communication, packet dropping and traffic flow enrouting at different cross-layered architectural levels built over the heterogeneous networks. An overview of the mechanisms to encounter the various vulnerabilities in the suggested framework is recommended. This article further identifies research directions and challenges to incorporate the possible techniques and preventive solutions, to overcome the malicious attacks in the software defined mobile cloud.