Fog Computing Security Assessment for Device Authentication in the Internet of Things

The Fog is an emergent computing architecture that will support the mobility and geographic distribution of Internet of Things (IoT) nodes and deliver context-aware applications with low latency to end-users. It forms an intermediate layer between IoT devices and the Cloud. However, Fog computing brings many requirements that increase the cost of security management. It inherits the security and trust issues of Cloud and acquires some of the vulnerable features of IoT that threaten data and application confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Several existing solutions address some of the security challenges following adequate adaptation, but others require new and innovative mechanisms. These reflect the need for a Fog architecture that provides secure access, efficient authentication, reliable and secure communication, and trust establishment among IoT devices and Fog nodes. The Fog might be more convenient to deploy decentralized authentication solutions for IoT than the Cloud if appropriately designed. In this short survey, we highlight the Fog security challenges related to IoT security requirements and architectural design. We conduct a comparative study of existing Fog architectures then perform a critical analysis of different authentication schemes in Fog computing, which confirms some of the fundamental requirements for effective authentication of IoT devices based on the Fog, such as decentralization, less resource consumption, and low latency.