COMITMENT: A Fog Computing Trust Management Approach

As an extension of cloud computing, fog computing is considered to be relatively more secure than cloud computing due to data being transiently maintained and analyzed on local fog nodes closer to data sources. However, there exist several security and privacy concerns when fog nodes collaborate and share data to execute certain tasks. For example, offloading data to a malicious fog node can result into an unauthorized collection or manipulation of users’ private data. Cryptographic-based techniques can prevent external attacks, but are not useful when fog nodes are already authenticated and part of a networks using legitimate identities. We therefore resort to trust to identify and isolate malicious fog nodes and mitigate security, respectively. In this paper, we present a fog COMputIng Trust manageMENT (COMITMENT) approach that uses quality of service and quality of protection history measures from previous direct and indirect fog node interactions for assessing and managing the trust level of the nodes within the fog computing environment. Using COMITMENT approach, we were able to reduce/identify the malicious attacks/interactions among fog nodes by approximately 66%, while reducing the service response time by approximately 15 s.