A Secure Privacy-Preserving Mutual Authentication Scheme for Publish-Subscribe Fog Computing

The exponential grow of internet of things applications leads to proposing fog computing structure that is geospatially distributed and latency sensitive. Since asynchronous dissemination of information is the main issue for typical distributed applications, publish-subscribe system is introduced as a key technology to provide asynchronous communications for distributed systems. In publish-subscribe systems, broker acts as a middleware in between subscribers and publishers and all communications are done through the brokers. However, serious security issues have been raised with such new architecture. In this paper, we propose a secure privacy-preserving mutual authentication scheme for fog-based publish-subscribe system using elliptic curve cryptography. The proposed scheme can provide mutual authentication between subscribers and brokers and between publishers and brokers. Moreover, the proposed scheme can preserve users' privacy due to the difficulty of relating the requested topic for subscription and/or publication to their anonymous identities. In addition, the proposed scheme can resist against the curiosity of users and/or brokers. The analysis of security services that are achieved by the proposed scheme is provided.