International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 79 – No 14, October 2013 15 Literature Review of Mobile Applications Testing on Cloud from Information Security Perspective Shilpa Bahl*1 CSE/IT KIIT College Of Engineering, Gurgaon gerashilpa@gmail.com M.M Chaturvedi 2 SET, Ansal University Sector-55, Gurgaon mmchaturvedi@ansaluniversity.edu.in ABSTRACT The adoption of mobile application is increasing at enormous rate due to their improved functionality and features. Increased storage and computing power has augmented its utility. However, these mobile applications are still intrinsically limited by a relative lack of bandwidth, computing power, storage and energy compared to desktops. To overcome these limitations, the concept of Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) providing abundant computing power and sufficient storage space besides large infrastructure has evolved. Cloud computing has its impact on all the stages of Software life cycle, including testing of mobile devices. In this paper we have reviewed Testing as a Service (TaaS) provided by Cloud computing. Testing of mobile application is more complex and time consuming as compared to traditional desktop applications. This paper reviews some published results in two major research fields ie cloud computing and TaaS and discusses architecture of cloud computing and TaaS in terms of necessity, features, emerging trends, benefits and gaps while focussing on security and privacy issues for mobile application. When we run our applications on the cloud, we are sharing our critical data with cloud and, therefore, security and privacy of data is a very serious issue to be considered. Keywords Cloud Computing, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC), TaaS, Information Security and Privacy. I INTRODUCTION 1.1 Cloud Computing The objective of cloud computing is to expand test capabilities and capacity giving standardized approach to testing by providing automated tools on cloud and utilizing cloud services on the fly in pay-as-you-go manner without investing in new infrastructure, licensing new software, and training new recruits. The Service and Deployment models of cloud are shown in Fig 1. Fig:1 Cloud Computing Models Cloud computing has a new identity by the developments in virtualization, distributed computing, utility computing, web and software services technologies [23].According to Kiah [13] the cloud has a layered architecture in which it has a backbone layer (physical servers and switches), supervisor software layer (OS, Hypervisor, Middle-ware),Software infrastructure layer shown in fig 2 which provides data storage, communication as service and infrastructure as services . Fig:2 Layered Architecture of Cloud Computing [2] The platform infrastructure layer provides an application development platform and a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for the developers for example Google App engine. The topmost application layer in the fig 2 allows users to access and use applications installed on a cloud provider’s data centre through the Internet. Cloud computing provide a new ground of a computing paradigm for resource constrained mobile devices called MCC (Mobile Cloud Computing). Cloud also consists of a large infrastructure (hardware, processors, hard disks, memories) so there may be a possibility of failure, there must be some critical recovery strategies. It is very crucial to test these recovery software’s and strategies. Gunwai [29] has discussed two new recovery strategies for cloud FATE (Failure testing Service) and DESTINI (Declarative testing specification) the former test cloud system Service Models Infrastucture as Service(IaaS) Platform as Service(PaaS) Software as Service(SaaS) Testing as Service(Taas) Deployment models Public Cloud Private Cloud Community Cloud Hybrid Cloud