Security in fog computing: A systematic review on issues, challenges and solutions

Abstract

Fog computing refers to cloud computing development to the edge of a corporate network. Fog computing, as a promising computing paradigm, facilitates computing, storing and network services between terminal devices and cloud computing data centers. It also brings many advantages to cloud computing and large-scale deployment of IoT applications such as low latency, data locality, location-awareness, mobility, less computational cost and geographical distribution. This extensive range of functionality raises various security concerns related to data, virtualization, segregation, network communication and monitoring. Security is a significant issue for fog computing since fog-based services are offered to massive-scale end-users by front fog nodes/servers. Also, fog computing focuses on ensuring the availability and reliability of services without worrying about the information stored or processed by the fog. Despite significant efforts that have been made in this field, many issues are still open. This paper prepares a comprehensive study of security challenges and different approaches in fog computing to address those challenges using the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach. Moreover, a technical taxonomy is offered for the fog security challenges and their strategies in terms of six aspects, including reliability, access control, attacks, secure connection, privacy and some special cases. The core objective of this study is to analytically and statistically classify the existing research techniques related to security aspects and available solutions in fog computing published between 2014 and 2021. Then some technical questions in this domain are provided, and also the strengths and weaknesses of each indicated fog security approach are discussed based on the questions, as well as suggesting some ideas to address security deficiencies in fog computing. Finally, some future motivational directions and open issues in this field are provided to design, implement, and maintain fog systems.