Securing edge computing using cryptographic schemes: a review

The exponential growth and wide-area applications of the Internet of Things have garnered a lot of interest from academics and industries, thus becoming one of the most actively studied research paradigms in recent years. Internet of Things is a concept that builds an inter-connected environment where physical devices collect data from the surroundings and customize it to our requirements. It is known for its fast processing and quick response. Edge computing is a platform that performs the computations on the data supplied by the Internet of Thing devices at the network edge that leads to real-time processing. Despite its advantages, privacy protection and security challenges remain a critical concern that must be addressed. This paper aims to give a comprehensive review on cryptographic schemes used for securing edge computing. In particular, we first present a concept of edge computing in the context of IoT including architecture and advantages over cloud computing. We have explored various encryption techniques like identity-based encryption, attribute-based encryption, searchable encryption, and homomorphic encryption that secure the sensitive data before processing it at the network edge. Various parameters of each encryption technique, such as the length of the public key, private key, and ciphetext, are compared. Computational complexity of encryption and decryption is also included in our comparative study. Although many review papers focused on authentication and authorization challenges, this review on encryption techniques in context of edge security was highly needed. We have also looked at some of the other review papers and compared them to our survey to show how important it is.