Towards an efficient key management and authentication strategy for combined fog-to-cloud continuum systems

Abstract

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Fog-to-cloud systems have emerged as a novel concept intended to improve service performance by considering fog and cloud resources in a coordinated way. In such a heterogeneous scenario, security provisioning becomes necessary, hence novel security solutions must be designed to handle the highly distributed fog-to-cloud nature. In the security area, key distribution and authentication are referred to as two critical pillars for a successful security deployment. Unfortunately, traditional centralized key distribution and authentication approaches do not meet the particularities brought by a Fog-tocloud system due to its distributed nature. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed key management and authentication (DKMA) strategy to make Fog-to-cloud systems as secure as possible. The paper ends up presenting some results assessing the benefits of the proposed strategy in terms of traffic and delay reduction.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version