Cloud computing provides elastic computing infrastructure and resources
which enable resource-on-demand and pay-as-you-go utility
computing models. We believe that new applications can leverage
these models to achieve new features that are not available
for legacy applications. In our project we aim to build elastic applications
which augment resource-constrained platforms, such as
mobile phones, with elastic computing resources from clouds. An
elastic application consists of one or more weblets, each of which
can be launched on a device or cloud, and can be migrated between
them according to dynamic changes of the computing environment
or user preferences on the device. This paper overviews the general
concept of this new application model, analyzes its unique security
requirements, and presents our design considerations to build
secure elastic applications. As first steps we propose a solution
for authentication and secure session management between weblets
running device side and those on the cloud. We then propose secure
migration and how to authorize cloud weblets to access sensitive
user data such as via external web services. We believe some
principles in our solution can be applied in other cloud computing
scenarios such as application integration between private and
public clouds in an enterprise environmen