Fog Computing Security Architecture for the Internet of Things Using Blockchain-Based Social Networks

Abstract

Despite that the cloud computing is considered as the panacea of processing and analyzing IoT data, it shows drawbacks in many other aspects like latency, bandwidth, and mobility when transferring data from connected devices to the cloud. The fog computing paradigm extends the cloud and refers to a geographically distributed computing paradigm at the edge of loT networks. However, realizing fog computing still has a long way to go, especially when it comes to security in the context of loT unconventional characteristics such as scalability, heterogeneity, mobility and limited resources. In addition, applying social network principles to the loT seems to be appealing to build the Internet of Things as a network of peer-to-peer networks. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid architecture for the Internet of things, combing fog computing to ensure security in the trustless loT environment. By enabling our fog computing architecture with blockchain-based social networks, users could easily manage smart objects via establishing tamper-proof digital identities in a trustless environment and build a new class of authentication and authorization mechanisms for the loT. We also demonstrate and analyze the feasibility of our architecture with a prototype.