Secure and privacy-preserving D2D communication in fog computing services

Abstract

Device-to-device (D2D)-aided fog network has proven to be a viable means to improve the performance of fog computing technology. To exploit the full potentials of the D2D-supported fog computing architecture, it is imperative to protect the information transmitted among collaborating fog nodes against unauthorized access as failure to do so may have catastrophic consequences. However, this critical issue has not been investigated in most of the existing works. Therefore, this paper proposes a secure and privacy-aware trust-based communication strategy for fog-to-fog collaborative services. An elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)-based two-party authentication and key agreement protocol is designed to allow two collaborating fog nodes generate a unique shared secret session key. A multi-colony head selection strategy is proposed using a multi-criteria decision-making method (MCDM), where multiple fog nodes are selected as colony head. A new efficient group key distribution and updating mechanism is designed for ensuring secured group communication. Consequently, ECC-based message dissemination approaches are designed for intra- and inter-colony trustworthy communications, where the generated secret session and group keys are used for data encryption. Moreover, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme guarantees data confidentiality and unforgeability against both Type I and Type II adversaries in the random oracle model (ROM) based on the intractability of the Computational Diffie–Hellman Problem (CDHP) and Discrete Logarithm Problem (DLP), respectively. An extensive performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is very efficient and suitable for practical deployment. Comparative analysis reveals that the proposed scheme reports an improvement of about 33.15%–93.88%, 18.87%–67.91% , and 38.5%–93.8% in computation cost, communication overhead, and energy consumption, respectively, over the state-of-the-art related schemes.