A Survey on Security and Privacy Issues in Edge-Computing-Assisted Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) is an innovative paradigm envisioned to provide massive applications that are now part of our daily lives. Millions of smart devices are deployed within complex networks to provide vibrant functionalities, including communications, monitoring, and controlling of critical infrastructures. However, this massive growth of IoT devices and the corresponding huge data traffic generated at the edge of the network created additional burdens on the state-of-the-art centralized cloud computing paradigm due to the bandwidth and resource scarcity. Hence, edge computing (EC) is emerging as an innovative strategy that brings data processing and storage near to the end users, leading to what is called the EC-assisted IoT. Although this paradigm provides unique features and enhanced Quality of Service (QoS), it also introduces huge risks in data security and privacy aspects. This article conducts a comprehensive survey on security and privacy issues in the context of EC-assisted IoT. In particular, we first present an overview of EC-assisted IoT, including definitions, applications, architecture, advantages, and challenges. Second, we define security and privacy in the context of EC-assisted IoT. Then, we extensively discuss the major classifications of attacks in EC-assisted IoT and provide possible solutions and countermeasures along with the related research efforts. After that, we further classify some security and privacy issues as discussed in the literature based on security services and based on security objectives and functions. Finally, several open challenges and future research directions for secure EC-assisted IoT paradigm are also extensively provided.