Date of Graduation

5-2021

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Computer Science & Computer Engineering

Advisor/Mentor

Brajendra Panda

Committee Member

Susan Gauch

Second Committee Member

Paul Cronan

Third Committee Member

Qinghua Li

Keywords

Attribute Based Encryption, Blockchain, Decentralized Authentication, Fog Federation, Malicious Fog Node, Rogue Node

Abstract

As the technological revolution advanced information security evolved with an increased need for confidential data protection on the internet. Individuals and organizations typically prefer outsourcing their confidential data to the cloud for processing and storage. As promising as the cloud computing paradigm is, it creates challenges; everything from data security to time latency issues with data computation and delivery to end-users. In response to these challenges CISCO introduced the fog computing paradigm in 2012. The intent was to overcome issues such as time latency and communication overhead and to bring computing and storage resources close to the ground and the end-users. Fog computing was, however, considered an extension of cloud computing and as such, inherited the same security and privacy challenges encountered by traditional cloud computing. These challenges accelerated the research community's efforts to find practical solutions. In this dissertation, we present three approaches for individual and organizational data security and protection while that data is in storage in fog nodes or in the cloud. We also consider the protection of these data while in transit between fog nodes and the cloud, and against rogue fog nodes, man-in-the-middle attacks, and curious cloud service providers. The techniques described successfully satisfy each of the main security objectives of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Further we study the impact of rogue fog nodes on end-user devices. These approaches include a new concept, the Fog-Federation (FF): its purpose to minimize communication overhead and time latency between the Fog Nodes (FNs) and the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) during the time the system is unavailable as a rogue Fog Node (FN) is being ousted. Further, we considered the minimization of data in danger of breach by rogue fog nodes. We demonstrate the efficiency and feasibility of each approach by implementing simulations and analyzing security and performance.

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