Details of Research Outputs

Mobile offloading systems have been proposed to migrate complex computations from mobile devices to powerful servers. While this may be beneficial from the performance and energy perspective, it certainly exhibits new challenges in terms of security due to increased data transmission over networks with potentially unknown threats. Among possible security issues are timing attacks which are not prevented by traditional cryptographic security. Metrics on which offloading decisions are based must include security aspects in addition to performance and energy-efficiency. This paper aims at quantifying the security attributes and their impact on the performance of mobile offloading systems. The offloading system is modeled as a hybrid CTMC and queueing model. The proposed model focuses on state transition and state-based control. The quantification analysis is carried out for steady-state behavior of the CTMC model as to optimize the weighted-sum cost measure. By transforming the security model to a model with absorbing state, we compute the “mean time to security failure” (MTTSF) measure. Finally, a security and performance tradeoff measure is computed based on the system model and optimum parameter set is found for the system.