Multi‐tier authentication schemes for fog computing: Architecture, security perspective, and challenges

摘要

Fog computing has revolutionized the computing domain by enabling resource sharing, such as online storage, and providing applications and software as services in near vicinity to the edge nodes through the Internet. Small- to large-sized companies, like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, have started switching to fog-computing-enabled infrastructures. Fog computing being distributed in nature and in near vicinity gives rises to security and privacy issues. Although mostly now a days, user identification is adopted via single sign-in process, such as simple password-based authentications, which is not a secure process. Several multi-tier authentication techniques are proposed to overcome single sign-in process limitations. In this article, we go through state-of-the-art schemes proposed over the period of 2011-2018 for multi-tier authentication, their weaknesses and security issues, and finally their solutions for fog-computing environment. We performed the comparison of available multi-tier authentication techniques based on three factors, ie, level of security, cost of deployment, and usability. Multi-tier authentication techniques are classified into categories in accordance with the aspects that are concerned with the authentication process. We are optimistic that this work will provide useful information to the researchers about the architectures of fog enabled systems and the underlying authentication models in a consolidated form.