An overview of Fog computing and its security issues

TLDR

Fog computing extends cloud services to the network edge, providing data, compute, storage, and application services to end users. This article explains Fog computing’s motivation and advantages, analyzes its applications in smart grids, vehicular traffic lights, and software‑defined networks, and highlights security and privacy issues. The authors review Fog computing’s state of the art, examine a man‑in‑the‑middle attack’s CPU and memory consumption, and discuss authentication and authorization techniques for securing Fog‑Cloud connections. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract

Summary Fog computing is a paradigm that extends Cloud computing and services to the edge of the network. Similar to Cloud, Fog provides data, compute, storage and application services to end users. In this article, we elaborate the motivation and advantages of Fog computing and analyse its applications in a series of real scenarios, such as Smart Grid, smart traffic lights in vehicular networks and software defined networks. We discuss the state of the art of Fog computing and similar work under the same umbrella. Distinguished from other reviewing work of Fog computing, this paper further discloses the security and privacy issues according to current Fog computing paradigm. As an example, we study a typical attack, man‐in‐the‐middle attack, for the discussion of system security in Fog computing. We investigate the stealthy features of this attack by examining its CPU and memory consumption on Fog device. In addition, we discuss the authentication and authorization techniques that can be used in Fog computing. An example of authentication techniques is introduced to address the security scenario where the connection between Fog and Cloud is fragile. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.