A reliable recommendation and privacy-preserving based cross-layer reputation mechanism for mobile cloud computing

•A recommendation and privacy based cross-layer reputation mechanism (RP-CRM).•The RP-CRM is secure, privacy preserving and efficient.•Rapid and accurate detection and management of malicious node.•The effective recommendation rate of RP-CRM is higher than that of SLCRM and FSLR.•The successful acceptation rate of RP-CRM is better than that of SLCRM and FSLR.

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is gaining popularity due to anywhere anytime data access. However, at the same time it also introduces the new privacy and security threats that have become an obstacle to the widespread use and popularity of MCC. In this paper, we propose a reliable recommendation and privacy preserving based cross-layer reputation mechanism (RP-CRM) to provide secure and privacy-aware communication process in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) based MCC (WM-MCC). RP-CRM integrates the cross-layer design with recommendation reputation reliability evaluation mechanism and the privacy preserving scheme to identify and manage the internal malicious nodes and protect the security and privacy against internal multi-layer attack, bad mouthing attack and information disclosure attack. Simulation results and performance analysis demonstrate that RP-CRM can provide rapid and accurate malicious node identification and management, and provide security and privacy protection against aforementioned attacks more effectively and efficiently.