Insights into security and privacy towards fog computing evolution

The incremental diffusion of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and applications represents the outcome of a world ever more connected by means of heterogeneous and mobile devices. IoT scenarios imply the presence of multiple data producers (e.g., sensors, actuators, RFID, NFC) and consumers (e.g., end-user devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and PCs). A variety of standards and protocols must cooperate to efficiently gather, process, and share the information. The fog computing paradigm, due to its distributed nature, represents a viable solution to cope with interoperability, scalability, security, and privacy issues, which naturally emerge, since it operates as an intermediate layer between data consumers/producers and traditional cloud systems. This paper analyzes the evolution in the modeling of new methodologies, related to fog computing and IoT, showing how moving security and privacy tasks toward the edge of the network provide both advantages and new challenges to be faced in this research field. The proposed discussion provides an overview of requirements for the realization of secure and privacy-aware IoT-based fog computing infrastructures.