On security and privacy issues of fog computing supported Internet of Things environment

Abstract

Recently, the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) is attracting much attention due to the huge potential. IoT uses the Internet as a key infrastructure to interconnect numerous geographically diversified IoT nodes which usually have scare resources, and therefore cloud is used as a key back-end supporting infrastructure. In the literature, the collection of the IoT nodes and the cloud is collectively called as an IoT cloud. Unfortunately, the IoT cloud suffers from various drawbacks such as huge network latency as the volume of data which is being processed within the system increases. To alleviate this issue, the concept of fog computing is introduced, in which foglike intermediate computing buffers are located between the IoT nodes and the cloud infrastructure to locally process a significant amount of regional data. Compared to the original IoT cloud, the communication latency as well as the overhead at the backend cloud infrastructure could be significantly reduced in the fog computing supported IoT cloud, which we will refer as IoT fog. Consequently, several valuable services, which were difficult to be delivered by the traditional IoT cloud, can be effectively offered by the IoT fog. In this paper, however, we argue that the adoption of IoT fog introduces several unique security threats. We first discuss the concept of the IoT fog as well as the existing security measures, which might be useful to secure IoT fog. Then, we explore potential threats to IoT fog.