  Mobile cloud computing is a new technology that enhances smartphone
applications capabilities in terms of performance, energy efficiency, and
execution support. These features are achieved via computation offloading
technique that is supported by specialized mobile cloud application development
models. However, the cloud-enabled applications are prone to application piracy
issue for which the traditional licensing frameworks are of no use. Therefore,
a new licensing framework is required to control application piracy in mobile
cloud environment. This paper presents a preliminary design of a novel
application licensing framework for mobile cloud environment that restricts
execution of applications on unauthenticated smartphones and cloud resources.
