Cloud Message Queueing and Notification: Challenges and Opportunities

The current mobile app development practice, like other large-scale network-centric software projects, is characterized by the use of event notification facilities supporting the exchange of effective and efficient data flows between the application's front-end, usually located on customer's terminal equipment, and the back-end services available within the cloud. In order to avoid the need of setting up the notification infrastructure from scratch for any new application, many cloud service providers and mobile system manufacturing companies provide cloud-based messaging solutions. Such solutions, however, are often characterized by vulnerabilities that can be exploited to compromise the mobile applications' security by violating the privacy and integrity in their operations. In this work, we analyze these issues and posit the potential for the blockchain technology to mitigate such threats.