Securing the Fog using Software-Defined Networking: A Study of Challenges, Approaches, and Open Problems

Fog computing is a new paradigm that provides Cloud-like services to the network edge where the end-users reside. It opens up the facilities of Cloud to the edge of the network. It enables a wide range of benefits, including enhanced security, decreased bandwidth, and reduced latency, it is an appropriate paradigm for many IoT services. As the Fog has similarities with the Cloud, it inherits all the security problems of the Cloud as well as faces new security and privacy issues such as authentication at different levels of gateways, trust model, Fog network security, etc. Recent research work shows that Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is very effective in managing network flows. In this study, we explore and provide a systemic analysis of the security and privacy issues of existing Fog-based networks. We present attack surfaces and threat models of Fog computing. We then discuss existing research projects to resolve security issues. We also analyze existing SDN-based solution for Fog networks. Through this study, we find out a set of open problems in existing Fog-based systems and provide a detailed description for each of them. Furthermore, we investigate the possibilities of an SDN-based solution for the Fog-based system.