A Fog Computing-based Framework for Privacy Preserving IoT Environments

Dhiah el Diehn Abou-Tair¹, Simon Büchsenstein², and Ala’ Khalifeh¹

¹School of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, German Jordanian University, Jordan

²Embedded Systems Engineering, University of Freiburg, Germany

Abstract: Privacy is becoming an indispensable component in the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) context. However, the IoT based devices and tools are exposed to several security and privacy threats, especially that these devices are mainly used to gather data about users’ habits, vital signs, surround environment, etc., which makes them a lucrative target to intruders. Up to date, conventional security and privacy mechanisms are not well optimized for IoT devices due to their limited energy, storage capacity, communication functionality and computing power, which influenced researchers to propose new solutions and algorithms to handle these limitations. Fog and cloud computing have been recently integrated in IoT environment to solve their resources’ limitations, thus facilitating new life scenarios-oriented applications. In this paper, a security and privacy preserving framework is proposed, which utilizes Fog and cloud computing in conjunction with IoT devices that aims at securing the users’ data and protecting their privacy. The framework has been implemented and tested using available technologies. Furthermore, a security analysis has been verified by simulating several hypothetical attack scenarios, which showed the effectiveness of the proposed framework and its capability of protecting the users’ information.

Keywords: Internet of thing, cloud computing, fog computing, privacy, security.