COMITMENT: A Fog Computing Trust Management Approach

• Published in: Journal of parallel and distributed computing Vol. 137; pp. 1 - 16
• Main Authors: Al-khafajiy, Mohammed, Baker, Thar, Asim, Muhammad, Guo, Zehua, Ranjan, Rajiv, Longo, Antonella, Puthal, Deepak, Taylor, Mark
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.03.2020
• Subjects: Fog computing; Quality of protection; Trust; Fog computing; Trust; Quality of protection
• ISSN: 0743-7315; 1096-0848
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpdc.2019.10.006

As an extension of cloud computing, fog computing is considered to be relatively more secure than cloud computing due to data being transiently maintained and analyzed on local fog nodes closer to data sources. However, there exist several security and privacy concerns when fog nodes collaborate and share data to execute certain tasks. For example, offloading data to a malicious fog node can result into an unauthorized collection or manipulation of users’ private data. Cryptographic-based techniques can prevent external attacks, but are not useful when fog nodes are already authenticated and part of a networks using legitimate identities. We therefore resort to trust to identify and isolate malicious fog nodes and mitigate security, respectively. In this paper, we present a fog COMputIng Trust manageMENT (COMITMENT) approach that uses quality of service and quality of protection history measures from previous direct and indirect fog node interactions for assessing and managing the trust level of the nodes within the fog computing environment. Using COMITMENT approach, we were able to reduce/identify the malicious attacks/interactions among fog nodes by approximately 66%, while reducing the service response time by approximately 15 s. •A Fog Computing Trust Management Approach has been proposed.•An algorithm to monitor fog’s resources and active processes was developed.•An algorithm to find the best fog nodes to handle the overload was evaluated.•A formal model of direct and indirect experience for fog trust was formulated.•A set of experiments were carried out demonstrating the performance of COMITMENT.