Trust-Based Secure Multi-Cloud Collaboration Framework in Cloud-Fog-Assisted IoT

Cloud-Fog-Assisted Internet-of-Things (IoT) is a convincing paradigm to provide users with on-demand and low-latency services through Fog nodes in the edge of multiple clouds (Multi-Cloud). Multi-Cloud is a scalable multi-domain service-oriented netcentric system and can respond to complicated user requirements leveraging Multi-Cloud Service Composition (MCSC). However, in MCSC, user security can be easily compromised by untrusted and curious cloud service providers that may collect and violate the privacy and other essential assets of cloud users. Although many trust-based MCSC solutions have been proposed to seek a trustworthy composite service with highest trust level, most of them are vulnerable to malicious users intending to break through the clouds and inflict serious data leakage or asset damage. Considering these security concerns on both malicious users and untrusted service providers, in this article, we present a trust-based secure multi-cloud collaboration framework for Cloud-Fog-Assisted IoT systems. Specifically, to guarantee the security of users, we develop a role-based trust evaluation method to enhance the trustworthiness of MCSC. To preserve the security of services, we design an efficient user authentication scheme and a secure collaboration scheme to provide collaborative user authentication and access control mechanism for MCSC. We develop a proof of concept implementation for our framework and demonstrate its practicability by performance evaluation with extensive experiments.