A Secure Mutual Authentication Model in Fog Computing Based on Elliptic Curve

Fog Computing presents a qualitative transformation in a decentralized computing architecture where different resources are located in various edge devices. This technique involves data processing in a centralized form and at the edge of the network to get trusted communication and approved authentication. This paper introduced a coherent mutual authentication with an adopted Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to improve the security margin with a smaller ciphering key length. The proposed model ensures a secure and fast mutual authentication between the Fog nodes and end users. Moreover, the proposed model overcomes the shortcomings of traditional authentication approaches. The investigation and analysis of acquired results prove that the proposed model fulfills the security aspects and reduces the computational overhead. The results show that the proposed model mitigates security threats and risks like man-in-the-middle attacks and illegal access. The proposed model is suitable for IoT applications and restricted resources, where the lightweight asymmetric key cryptosystem has been applied. A revocation mechanism is also included in the proposed mechanism to prevent unauthorized access to fog nodes. A security and computational efficiency evaluation are performed along with a comparison with the existing authentication scheme.