Secure and Lightweight HMAC Mutual Authentication Protocol for Communication between IoT Devices and Fog Nodes

The transition from regular Internet to "Internet of Things" (IoT) is leading to multiple changes in the standard ways of communication. Today, the cloud computing paradigm faces many challenges like low capacity, high latency and network failure. It can show its limits in a context of connected objects for example, latency-sensitive applications will need to use a large number of nodes to meet the performance level. However the performance of such cloud services was limited by the performance loads offered by the respective data centers servers hosting these cloud services. In addition, these devices generate data in a large number of formats using various protocols, making acquisition and processing in real time difficult. That are critical for some IoT applications. For all these reasons, the world has seen the emergence of a new competing concept or rather a complement to cloud computing, which is more adapted to the Internet of Things: it is the Fog Computing. On the other hand, the heterogeneous nature of IoT communications and the imbalanced resource capabilities between different entities make it challenging to provide end to end secured connections. Nevertheless, a direct use of existing standard key establishment protocols to initiate connections between two IoT entities does not suit resource-constrained devices and is in most cases impractical, as the use of expensive cryptographic primitives leaves aside a whole class of resource-constrained devices. Unlike Internet servers, most IoT components are characterized by low power and computing capacity, and are therefore unable to support complex security systems. In this article, we present the architecture, characteristic of fog computing, the key differences between the Fog model and Cloud Computing, the role-played for the internet of things and reviews a wide range of applications of fog computing. Then, we present also an HMAC mutual authentication protocol for Securing IoT-enabled Applications at the Fog Platform.