An Efficient Federated Identity Management Protocol For Heterogeneous Fog computing Architecture

Abstract

With the emergence of new data externalization ar-chitectures, as fog computing, having access to external computing services will become much easier. Yet, these new architectures bring ahead many security concerns. Secure federated identity management (FidM) is a promising approach that facilitate fast and secure access to computing services. However, existing security mechanisms applied in the current FidM protocols does not efficiently support cross-collaboration in heterogeneous fog computing architecture where we have multiple security domains. In this paper, we propose a novel federated identity management protocol for secure identity mapping in heterogeneous fog computing architecture. Our protocol allows to create a federation among multiple heterogeneous security domains. Each domain is controlled by an autonomous authority that manages a set of service providers (fog nodes). The federation context is created in a completely decentralized manner. As a result, none of the authorities forming the federation will be in control of that context. Based on secure cryptographic token approach, our scheme allows any service provider to authenticate and map any end-user identity in the system. Regardless of where the token comes from, a service provider always uses the same key to verify the validity of that token. Moreover, the mapping process is fast and locally executed by the service provider. Finally, we present an evaluation of the performance of each phase in our protocol.