Designing a Fog-Cloud Architecture using Blockchain and Analyzing Security Improvements
Mahmudul Hassan Ashik, Mirza Mohd Shahriar Maswood, Abdullah G. Alharbi · 2020 International Conference on Electrical, Communication, and Computer Engineering (ICECCE) · 2020
Ethereum is a blockchain-based distributed network and has been a successful platform to host decentralized applications. On the other hand, fog computing has emerged as one of the most demanding field for research as it brings the services of cloud to the edge of the network, i.e. closer to the IoT devices. To satisfy the QoS requirement of latency sensitive applications, the concept of fog computing is introduced in order to implement the idea of smart home, city etc. Though the fog nodes can support latency sensitive applications, but their computational capacity is low which leads to more vulnerability against known attacks. But Ethereum has paved the way to develop smart contracts to implement any logic written in it upon calling. The usage of smart contracts in securing the fog node can be effective as it runs in a blockchain enabled network which makes the smart contract immutable and secured against modification. This creates a scope of using smart contract's logic to ensure the security of fog nodes and IoT devices which they earnestly require. This also eliminates the necessity of public-private key pair and other authentication systems used in fog-cloud architecture. In our work, we modified the conventional fog-cloud architecture by introducing blockchain-based fog layer to ensure better security and privacy for both fog layer and IoT devices.