Secure Distributed Data Management for Fog Computing in Large-Scale IoT Application: A Blockchain-Based Solution

Fog computing, a novel computing paradigm, migrates cloud computing to the edge of network and consequently decrease the overhead of process and movement of the large-scale big data. Fog computing is promising to lower communication delay and offload network traffic with the scale of big data increasing in large-scale IoT application, which brings micro-data centers to the network edge, enabling the network edge to perceive, process, storage and calculate the massive data, reducing the amount of transferred data. However, numerous fog nodes at the network edge face an external attack resulting in serious security threats arising from the trusting relationship vulnerability because of the lack of the consideration of the properties of the fog computing system. This paper addresses the design for developing secure distributed data management platform for fog computing in large-scale IoT application, along with a blockchain-based data management implementation of the platform, which approaches the major challenges: how to realize the integration of data security and storage management for fog computing in large-scale IoT application and enrich rational interoperability for interconnected things. Experimental results show that the system works well to empower data provenance and transparency and defend against unauthorized access effectively in fog computing, scales well with loss of the performance of communication and computing maintaining in acceptable range, verifying the efficiency and feasibility of our design to provide privacy, integrity and fine-grained data management for fog computing in large-scale IoT application by introducing the data management platform based upon the blockchain network and smart contracts therein.