Authentication, Access Control, Privacy, Threats and Trust Management Towards Securing Fog Computing Environments: A Review

TL;DR

This paper reviews security challenges in fog computing, emphasizing authentication, access control, privacy, and trust, and explores blockchain solutions and future research directions to enhance security in this distributed environment.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey and taxonomy of security issues in fog computing, highlighting gaps and proposing blockchain-based solutions for improved security.

Findings

Identified key security concerns in fog computing environment.

Proposed taxonomy categorizing security issues and solutions.

Discussed blockchain-based approaches for enhancing security.

Abstract

Fog computing is an emerging computing paradigm that has come into consideration for the deployment of IoT applications amongst researchers and technology industries over the last few years. Fog is highly distributed and consists of a wide number of autonomous end devices, which contribute to the processing. However, the variety of devices offered across different users are not audited. Hence, the security of Fog devices is a major concern in the Fog computing environment. Furthermore, mitigating and preventing those security measures is a research issue. Therefore, to provide the necessary security for Fog devices, we need to understand what the security concerns are with regards to Fog. All aspects of Fog security, which have not been covered by other literature works needs to be identified and need to be aggregate all issues in Fog security. It needs to be noted that computation devices consist of many ordinary users, and are not managed by any central entity or managing body. Therefore, trust and privacy is also a key challenge to gain market adoption for Fog. To provide the required trust and privacy, we need to also focus on authentication, threats and access control mechanisms as well as techniques in Fog computing. In this paper, we perform a survey and propose a taxonomy, which presents an overview of existing security concerns in the context of the Fog computing paradigm. We discuss the Blockchain-based solutions towards a secure Fog computing environment and presented various research challenges and directions for future research.