Pairing-Free Certificateless Data Auditing for Fog assisted Cyber Physical Systems

Fog-assisted Cyber-Physical Systems (Fog-CPSs) enable distributed data processing but face heightened security risks due to fog nodes’ increased vulnerability compared to traditional cloud servers. Ensuring data integrity is essential to protect against data corruption during collection and storage. Certificateless cryptography offers an effective solution by enhancing security without the key escrow issues associated with Public Key Infrastructure and Identity-Based Cryptography. Current cloud-based data integrity protocols often rely on a third-party auditor, which can introduce latency and centralized dependency. This paper introduces a novel certificateless data integrity checking scheme for Fog-CPSs that is pairing-free and localized within the fog infrastructure. Unlike traditional models, the proposed scheme positions both auditor and auditee within the fog, reducing latency and strengthening data verification resilience. A cloud-based audit verifier also oversees data integrity across fog nodes. Security evaluations confirm the protocol’s resistance to metadata tampering, while performance assessments demonstrate its efficiency in resource-constrained environments. This scheme establishes a robust, distributed data integrity mechanism for Fog-CPS applications, enhancing data trustworthiness and system resilience against emerging security threats.