Data Security and Privacy-Preserving in Edge Computing Paradigm: Survey and Open Issues

TLDR

The explosive growth of IoT devices and massive edge‑generated data has exposed bandwidth and resource bottlenecks in centralized cloud computing, prompting the rise of edge computing but also introducing new security and privacy challenges that have yet to be comprehensively surveyed. This survey systematically analyzes data security and privacy threats, protection technologies, and countermeasures in edge computing, and outlines several open research directions. The authors review edge computing fundamentals, assess security and privacy requirements and challenges, summarize cryptographic solutions, and survey state‑of‑the‑art approaches across related paradigms.

Abstract

With the explosive growth of Internet of Things devices and massive data produced at the edge of the network, the traditional centralized cloud computing model has come to a bottleneck due to the bandwidth limitation and resources constraint. Therefore, edge computing, which enables storing and processing data at the edge of the network, has emerged as a promising technology in recent years. However, the unique features of edge computing, such as content perception, real-time computing, and parallel processing, has also introduced several new challenges in the field of data security and privacy-preserving, which are also the key concerns of the other prevailing computing paradigms, such as cloud computing, mobile cloud computing, and fog computing. Despites its importance, there still lacks a survey on the recent research advance of data security and privacy-preserving in the field of edge computing. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of the data security and privacy threats, protection technologies, and countermeasures inherent in edge computing. Specifically, we first make an overview of edge computing, including forming factors, definition, architecture, and several essential applications. Next, a detailed analysis of data security and privacy requirements, challenges, and mechanisms in edge computing are presented. Then, the cryptography-based technologies for solving data security and privacy issues are summarized. The state-of-the-art data security and privacy solutions in edge-related paradigms are also surveyed. Finally, we propose several open research directions of data security in the field of edge computing.