Data Security and Privacy in Fog Computing

Cloud computing is now a popular computing paradigm that can provide end users access to configurable resources on any device, from anywhere, at any time. During the past years, cloud computing has been developed dramatically. However, with the development of the Internet of Things, the disadvantages (such as high latency) of cloud computing are gradually revealed due to the long distance between the cloud and end users. Fog computing is proposed to solve this problem by extending the cloud to the edge of the network. In particular, fog computing introduces an intermediate layer called fog that is designed to process the communication data between the cloud and end users. Hence, fog computing is usually considered as an extension of cloud computing. In this article, we discuss the design issues for data security and privacy in fog computing. Specially, we present the unique data security and privacy design challenges presented by the fog layer and highlight the reasons why the data protection techniques in cloud computing cannot be directly applied in fog computing.