Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) combines the features of mobile computing, cloud computing, and wireless networks to create the healthy computational resources to mobile cloud users. The aim of MCC is to execute the highly attractive mobile applications on a plethora of mobile cellular telephones, with highly rich user experience. From the perspective of mobile computing, Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning depends on the efficiency of the handoff process. Thus, it is highly important to introduce an energy efficient and secure handoff process to improve the performance. In this paper, we propose a Secure Seamless Fast Handoff (SSFH) scheme to improve the energy efficiency and the QoS in the MCC. The proposed scheme consists of four layers: application layer, service layer, infrastructure layer, and media layer. These four layers collectively handle the security, energy-efficiency, and the QoS. Existing service-oriented architectures designed for the MCC are based on the symmetric encryption protocols to support the application layer. However, it is much easier for an adversary to expose the symmetric key and gain access to the confidential data. The application layer is secured using a combination of both attribute-based encryption and an asymmetric encryption cryptography. To extend the mobile lifetime, energy detection (ED) model is deployed at the infrastructure layer to detect the energy level of the mobile devices prior to the pre-registration process. Furthermore, a dual authentication process is performed on the service and at the application layer to minimize the possibility of identity high jacked or impersonation attack. The media layer supports the secure handoff process using policy enforcement module that allows only legitimate users to complete the re registration process after initiating the handoff. Thus, a significant amount of the bandwidth and energy could be preserved. Finally, the secure service-oriented architecture is programmed using C++ platform and the results are compared with other well-known existing service-oriented architectures. The experimental results confirm the validity and the effectiveness of our proposed architecture. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.