Securing Fog Computing for Internet of Things Applications: Challenges and Solutions

• Published in: IEEE Communications surveys and tutorials Vol. 20; no. 1; pp. 601 - 628
• Main Authors: Ni, Jianbing, Zhang, Kuan, Lin, Xiaodong, Shen, Xuemin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2018
• Subjects: Cloud computing; Computer architecture; Data privacy; Edge computing; Fog computing; Internet of Things; Privacy; Real-time systems; Security; security and privacy
• ISSN: 1553-877X
• DOI: 10.1109/COMST.2017.2762345

Internet of Things (IoT) allows billions of physical objects to be connected to collect and exchange data for offering various applications, such as environmental monitoring, infrastructure management, and home automation. On the other hand, IoT has unsupported features (e.g., low latency, location awareness, and geographic distribution) that are critical for some IoT applications, including smart traffic lights, home energy management and augmented reality. To support these features, fog computing is integrated into IoT to extend computing, storage and networking resources to the network edge. Unfortunately, it is confronted with various security and privacy risks, which raise serious concerns towards users. In this survey, we review the architecture and features of fog computing and study critical roles of fog nodes, including real-time services, transient storage, data dissemination and decentralized computation. We also examine fog-assisted IoT applications based on different roles of fog nodes. Then, we present security and privacy threats towards IoT applications and discuss the security and privacy requirements in fog computing. Further, we demonstrate potential challenges to secure fog computing and review the state-of-the-art solutions used to address security and privacy issues in fog computing for IoT applications. Finally, by defining several open research issues, it is expected to draw more attention and efforts into this new architecture.