Abstract
The world has experienced a huge advancement in computing technology. People prefer outsourcing their confidential data for storage and processing in cloud computing because of the auspicious services provided by cloud service providers. As promising as this paradigm is, it creates issues, including everything from data security to time latency with data computation and delivery to end-users. In response to these challenges, the fog computing paradigm was proposed as an extension of cloud computing to overcome the time latency and communication overhead and to bring computing and storage resources close to both the ground and the end-users. However, fog computing inherits the same security and privacy challenges encountered by traditional cloud computing. This paper proposed a fine-grained data access control approach by integrating the ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) algorithm and blockchain technology to secure end-users’ data security against rogue fog nodes in case a compromised fog node is ousted. In this approach, we proposed federations of fog nodes that share the same attributes, such as services and locations. The fog federation concept minimizes the time latency and communication overhead between fog nodes and cloud servers. Furthermore, the blockchain idea and the CP-ABE algorithm integration allow for fog nodes within the same fog federation to conduct a distributed authorization process. Besides that, to address time latency and communication overhead issues, we equip each fog node with an off-chain database to store the most frequently accessed data files for a particular time, as well as an on-chain access control policies table (on-chain files tracking table) that must be protected from tampering by rogue fog nodes. As a result, the blockchain plays a critical role here because it is tamper-proof by nature. We assess our approach’s efficiency and feasibility by conducting a simulation and analyzing its security and performance.
Highlights
Cloud computing is a thriving paradigm due to the enormous on-demand services to end-users over the internet
The blockchain immutability feature prevents fog nodes from maliciously changing the on-chain tracking table; if such a change is detected, the FN that issues the request is reported as a rogue fog node
We adopted the blockchain in this approach as a medium to store an on-chain tracking table to verify the identity of each fog node in the fog federation using the smart contract before they could access the encrypted data on the cloud service provider (CSP)
Summary
Cloud computing is a thriving paradigm due to the enormous on-demand services to end-users over the internet. End-users outsource their data to the core network on the cloud for processing and storage. The response time between users and the cloud is high because the data are stored far away from the data owners. The end-users’ data security and privacy are susceptible to violation because the semi-trusted third party controls the cloud. The research community has studied data security and privacy issues in cloud computing by adopting and applying advanced cryptographic techniques, as described in [2,3,4,5,6]. The demand to invent a new technology to resolve the cloud latency issue is still present [7,8]
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