Toward Architectural and Protocol-Level Foundation for End-to-End Trustworthiness in Cloud/Fog Computing

Abstract

With Cloud/Fog Computing being a paradigm combination of IoT context and Edge Computing extended with Cloud/Fog, business process in it involves dataflows among multi-layers and multi-nodes, possibly provided by multi-organizations. Achieving end-to-end trustworthiness over the whole dataflow in such a Cloud/Fog Computing context is a challenging issue, nonetheless a necessary pre-condition for a successful business process on intra-/inter- organizational level. This paper investigates technical conundrums related to this target and proposes a policy-based approach for trustworthiness governance. An architectural layout is proposed with according modules, by carrying out two methodologies. One resides in tracing data derivation and maintaining security-level over the whole dataflow, handling data aggregation with several protocols. The other is to express data owner trustworthiness requirements with an enhanced attribute-based access control policy model and to evaluate data accessing nodes’ trustworthiness-related properties. Experiments show that processing time per attribute pair drops as the scales of policies increase, suggesting good scaling property of the system.