A Robust Fog-Computing Security Approach for IoT Healthcare Applications

Internet of Things (IoT) is currently considered to be among the most recent technologies that enable a large number of physical objects to be linked across the Internet to exchange and transfer information among them. This technology has a wide range of applications, including environmental monitoring, smart homes, and health monitoring. Given the fact that such an interconnection is accompanied with a huge amount of generated data, a major challenge faced is coping with the delay in processing time and data transmission. Within the scope of healthcare applications, such delay would form a dangerous risk in case the system does not meet the compatibility requirements of health monitoring, in addition to the several security and privacy threats that are encountered. One of the solutions suggested to reduce the service latency and network congestion is the application of Fog computing with Cloud services. To ensure the safe transmission of data between IoT devices and the cloud, while keeping the possible network latency and response time to a minimum, the present study proposes a three-layered IoT-Fog computing model that deploys an authentication stage and an encryption stage with cloud computing. The obtained results indicate that the model succeeded in decreasing the network latency while increasing the security of connection and accuracy of performance when implemented in healthcare applications.