Privacy-Aware and Authentication based on Blockchain with Fault Tolerance for IoT enabled Fog Computing

Abstract

Fog computing is a new distributed computing paradigm that extends the cloud to the network edge. Fog computing aims at improving quality of service, data access, networking, computation and storage. However, the security and privacy issues persist, even if many cloud solutions were proposed. Indeed, Fog computing introduces new challenges in terms of security and privacy, due to its specific features such as mobility, geo-distribution and heterogeneity etc. Blockchain is an emergent concept bringing efficiency in many fields. In this paper, we propose a new access control scheme based on blockchain technology for the fog computing with fault tolerance in the context of the Internet of Things. Blockchain is used to provide secure management authentication and access process to IoT devices. Each network entity authenticates in the blockchain via the wallet, which allows a secure communication in decentralized environment, hence it achieves the security objectives. In addition, we propose to establish a secure connection between the users and the IoT devices, if their attributes satisfy the policy stored in the blockchain by smart contract. We also address the blockchain transparency problem by the encryption of the users attributes both in the policy and in the request. An authorization token is generated if the encrypted attributes are identical. Moreover, our proposition offers higher scalability, availability and fault tolerance in Fog nodes due to the implementation of load balancing through the Min-Min algorithm.