An Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme to Secure Fog Communications

Fog computing is deemed as a highly virtualized paradigm that can enable computing at the Internet of Things devices, residing in the edge of the network, for the purpose of delivering services and applications more efficiently and effectively. Since fog computing originates from and is a non-trivial extension of cloud computing, it inherits many security and privacy challenges of cloud computing, causing the extensive concerns in the research community. To enable authentic and confidential communications among a group of fog nodes, in this paper, we propose an efficient key exchange protocol based on ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) to establish secure communications among the participants. To achieve confidentiality, authentication, verifiability, and access control, we combine CP-ABE and digital signature techniques. We analyze the efficiency of our protocol in terms of security and performance. We also implement our protocol and compare it with the certificate-based scheme to illustrate its feasibility.