SECURITY ISSUES IN MOBILE COMPUTING

Day by day electronic devices like laptops, mobiles, notebooks and other electronic gadgets are growing very fastly. By using these devices people can able to store and retrieve the information as and when necessary. Even by using these devices communication will be established between the users. All these devices are having the feature known as mobility. These devices can take from one place to another place; we can use them for different purpose depends upon the nature of the device. Where there is flexibility and facility there also exists the risks. The information which can be transmitted can be hacked by the people. To avoid such conditions security has to be provided to the devices as well as to the network provided for the communication. The required infrastructure for mobile computing are wireless communication, mobility and easily portable. These infrastructure raises number of problems they are Disconnection, bandwidth and interface variability and different types of networks present. In mobile networks we don’t have a fixed connection to establish for the communication and intercell hand offs, noise can be causes of disconnection. In mobile network the available band width will be low. While accessing through wireless network or through switching from one mechanism to other mechanism may produce the problems. Similarly for the mobile networks, it is not homogenous, it is heterogeneous. Mobility also introduces some problems like address migration, location dependent information and privacy. Portability will also introduces some problems like low power which effects portability, even the transactions may end in the middle due to disconnection, risk to data like physical damage and unauthorized access. Number of security issues addressed in mobile computing like authentication, confidentiality, accountability, integrity, availability etc. All these issues should take care of so that the system will be secure enough. Out of all the issues confidentiality and authentication is given more importance where the user should be secured from unauthorized eavesdropping. Whenever if a user wants to access the information of the other person, before providing that either the network or the devices has to check his identity to prevent the unauthorized access. To take care of this kind of issues network security protocols has to be used which uses the computational power and the available bandwidth. Whenever if a protocol is used, it should be thoroughly designed in such a way that it should not use more computational resources