Fog Mix-Zone Approach for Preserving Privacy in IoT

Protecting privacy has become one of the most important challenges for the future of modern technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city applications. The process of tracking the users' location and analyzing their whereabouts at a certain time can pose a real danger to the users by revealing a lot of their sensitive and private data to the attacker. This research provides a new and improved design of the Mix-zone approach by employing fog nodes for smart management and exchange of pseudonyms between users, and avoiding the automatic generation of them, which can be easily traced and discovered by the service provider. The proposed approach will significantly improve the level of privacy and contribute to misleading malicious parties who always intend to violate the user's privacy. These scrupulous people may even include the service providers. The simulation which we conducted, have demonstrated the ability of the proposed model to protect privacy and its superiority over the traditional approach in terms of the level of privacy and level of performance.