A Trust Management Delegation Protocol for Fog Computing Applications

Fog computing applications involve collaboration among several devices, end and fog nodes. Trust management can enhance the security and reliability of fog applications by supporting the selection of trusted nodes to collaborate. Although several mechanisms for managing trust in fog computing have been proposed, they have not considered the difference in the ability of devices to perform trust management. Devices with limited resources are unable to manage trust on their own without support from resource-rich devices. We propose a trust management delegation protocol based on the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) to address this. Our protocol allows resource-constrained devices to delegate trust management to resource-rich devices that can manage trust on their behalf. Experimental evaluation results show that using our protocol for trust management delegation consumes less resources compared to managing trust locally. Our protocol enables resource-constrained devices to exploit the resources available in fog computing environments to manage their trust.