Secure Web Referral Services for Mobile Cloud Computing

Security has become a major concern for mobile devices when mobile users browsing malicious websites. Existed security solutions may rely on human factors to achieve a good result against phishing websites and SSL Strip-based Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack. This paper presents a secure web referral service, which is called Secure Search Engine (SSE) for mobile devices. The system uses mobile cloud-based virtual computing and provides each user a Virtual Machine (VM) as a personal security proxy where all Web traffics are redirected through it. Within the VM, the SSE uses web crawling technology with a set of checking services to validate IP addresses and certificate chains. A Phishing Filter is also used to check given URLs with an optimized execution time. The system also uses private and anonymously shared caches to protect user privacy and improve performance. The evaluation results show that SSE is non-intrusive and consumes no power or computation on the client device, while producing less false positive and false negative than existing web browser-based anti-phishing solutions.