Fog-Based Internet of Things: A Security Scheme

Internet of Things (IoT) stack models differ in their architecture, applications and needs. Hence, there are different approaches to apply IoT; for instance, it can be based on traditional data center or based on cloud computing. In fact, Cloud-based IoT is gaining more popularity due to its high scalability and cost effectiveness; hence, it is becoming the norm. However, Cloud is usually located far from the IoT devices and some recent research suggests using Fog-Based IoT by using a nearby light-weight middleware to bridge the gap and to provide the essential support and communication between devices, sensors, receptors and the servers. Therefore, Fog reduces centrality and provides local processing for faster analysis, especially for the time-sensitive applications. Thus, processing is done faster, giving the system flexibility for faster response time. Fog-Based Internet of Things security architecture should be suitable to the environment and provide the necessary measures to improve all security aspects with respect to the available resources and within performance constraints. In this work, we discuss some of these challenges, analyze performance of Fog based IoT and propose a security scheme based on MQTT protocol. Moreover, we present a discussion on security-performance tradeoffs.