Distributed Firewall and Controller for Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is a technique in which mobile users are able to use the cloud services that enable cost reduction, flexibility and on demand, scalability. In fact, MCC enables to share the hardware, data and storage. However, access network verification is an important requirement; the traditional cloud computing architecture has specific security requirements that are not captured by traditional network access control models, e.g. Virtual firewalls (VF). The latter uses an effective static verification method that is not adapted to the MCC, where existing threats increase because of the combination of different types of networks (Mobile and Internet). Thus, distributing firewalls is introduced by researchers to prevent possible attacks and secure complex networks like MCC. However, it is difficult to design, manage and cooperate firewall policies. Thence, we propose in this paper an architecture for MCC motivating the use of distributed firewalls/Controllers, where two levels of firewall cooperation are proposed: horizontal cooperation in the cloud and vertical cooperation between the mobile and the cloud. This architecture is in charge of administering and updating rules between distributed firewalls and their neighbors via the Controller component. For validation, we use a cloud implementation based on the Openstack platform. The retrieved delay is promising with regard to the traffic burden.