HIBAF: A data security scheme for fog computing

Abstract

Fog computing complemented cloud computing integration services in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the web of real-time interactivity. Fog offers faster computing and other services facilities sitting close to user applications. However, secure data transfer in the fog is still a challenging issue requiring attention and efficient deployment of a secure data security scheme. We present an Identity Based Encryption (IBE) scheme to secure data security and transmission in fog clouds and IoT ecosystems. We devise and develop a four-level Hierarchical Identity Based Architecture for Fog Computing (HIBAF) data security scheme to enhance data security. We also analyze the system’s performance regarding response time, CPU utilization, run-time encryption-decryption, and key generation time in the fog computing paradigm to an increasing number of users data-loads. Moreover, we evaluate our scheme and compare the outcomes with different cryptography structures to discern our scheme’s effectiveness. Furthermore, we also evaluate secret key updating time, re-encrypted key updating time, and file revoking time by launching DDoS attacks both in the cloud and fog computing environment to compare improvements of HIBAF in the fog computing paradigm. Finally, through this overall evaluation, we have found that the developed HIBAF scheme provides a 33% performance enhancement in a fog environment in terms of data processing, provision, and management compared to the cloud environment.