An overview of Fog computing and its security issues

Abstract

Fog computing is a paradigm that extends Cloud computing and services to the edge of the network. Similar to Cloud, Fog provides data, compute, storage and application services to end users. In this article, we elaborate the motivation and advantages of Fog computing and analyse its applications in a series of real scenarios, such as Smart Grid, smart traffic lights in vehicular networks and software defined networks. We discuss the state of the art of Fog computing and similar work under the same umbrella. Distinguished from other reviewing work of Fog computing, this paper further discloses the security and privacy issues according to current Fog computing paradigm. As an example, we study a typical attack, man-in-the-middle attack, for the discussion of system security in Fog computing. We investigate the stealthy features of this attack by examining its CPU and memory consumption on Fog device. In addition, we discuss the authentication and authorization techniques that can be used in Fog computing. An example of authentication techniques is introduced to address the security scenario where the connection between Fog and Cloud is fragile.In the past few years, Cloud computing has provided many opportunities for enterprises by offering their customers a range of computing services. Current 'pay-as-you-go' Cloud computing model becomes an efficient alternative to owning and managing private data centres for customers facing Web applications and batch processing [8]. Cloud computing frees the enterprises and their end users from the specification of many details, such as storage resources, computation limitation and network communication cost. However, this bliss becomes a problem for latency-sensitive applications, which require nodes in the vicinity to meet their delay requirements [2]. When techniques and devices of IoT are getting more involved in people's life, current Cloud computing paradigm can hardly satisfy their requirements of mobility support, location awareness and low latency.Fog computing is proposed to address the aforementioned problem [1]. As Fog computing is implemented at the edge of the network, it provides low latency, location awareness and improves quality-of-services (QoS) for streaming and real time applications. Typical examples include industrial automation, transportation and networks of sensors and actuators. Moreover, this new infrastructure supports heterogeneity as Fog devices include end-user devices, access points, edge routers and switches. The Fog paradigm is well positioned for real time big data analytics, supports densely distributed data collection points and provides advantages in entertainment, advertising, personal computing and other applications. WHAT CAN WE DO WITH FOG?We elaborate on the role of Fog computing in the following six motivating scenarios. The advantages of Fog computing satisfy the requirements of applications in these scenarios.Smart Grid: Energy load balancing applications may run on network edge devices, such as smart metres and micro-grids [9]. Ba...

Fog computing security: a review of current applications and security solutions

“…Cloud Security Alliance [18] have identified twelve critical security issues, including other researchers such as [6,19,20]. These issues directly impact distributed, shared and on-demand nature of cloud computing.…”

“…Insecure authentication protocols between Fog platforms and end-user devices have been identified as a main security concern of Fog computing by [19]. The author's claim that the IoT devices, especially in smart grids, are prone to data tampering and spoofing attacks and can be prevented with the help of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), DiffieHellman key exchange, Intrusion detection techniques and monitoring for modified input values.…”

Implementation of Fog computing in IoT-based healthcare system

“…Despite the numerous bene its of Fog computing implementation in IoT systems, there are numerous challenges that must be considered. Even there are works that discuss privacy and security issues in Fog computing [1,3,11,13,18,26,[28][29][30]32], these aspects still can be considered as understudied. The development of novel security and privacy mechanism according to the Fog computing paradigm and their implementation will enable Fog computing vision to show its full potential in IoT systems.…”

Application of Fog Computing in Military Operations

“…Most valuable data may still be transmitted through cloud networks, but much of the traffic would be kept off of those networks. Ivan Stojmenovic et.al, studied man-in-the-middle attack in Fog computing and stealthy features of this attack by observing Processor and memory consumption on Fog device [9]. Also discussed authentication and authorization techniques that can be implemented in Fog computing.…”