An Encryption-Based Approach to Protect Fog Federations from Rogue Nodes.

The cloud computing paradigm has revolutionized the concept of computing and has gained a huge attention since it provides computing resources as a service over the internet. As auspicious as this model is, it brings forth many challenges: everything from data security to time latency issues with data computation and delivery to end users. To manage these challenges with the cloud, a fog computing paradigm has emerged. In the context of the computing, fog computing involves placing mini clouds close to end users to solve time latency problems. However, as fog computing is an extension of cloud computing, it inherits the same security and privacy challenges encountered by traditional cloud computing. These challenges have accelerated the research community’s efforts to find effective solutions. In this paper, we propose a secure and fine-grained data access control scheme based on the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) algorithm to prevent fog nodes from violating end users’ confidentiality in situations where a compromised fog node has been ousted. In addition, to provide decreased time latency and low communication overhead between the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and the fog nodes (FNs), our scheme classifies the fog nodes into fog federations (FF), by location and services provided, and each fog node divides the plaintext to be encrypted into multiple blocks to accelerate the time when retrieving ciphertext from the CSP. We demonstrate our scheme’s efficiency by carrying on a simulation and analyzing its security and performance.