Balancing Security Guarantees vs QoS Provisioning in Combined Fog-to-cloud

Several efforts are currently active in dealing with scenarios combining fog, cloud computing, out of which a significant proportion is devoted to control, and manage the resulting scenario. Certainly, although many challenging aspects must be considered towards the design of an efficient management solution, it is with no doubt that whatever the solution is, the quality delivered to the users when executing services and the security guarantees provided to the users are two key aspects to be considered in the whole design. Unfortunately, both requirements are often non-convergent, thus making a solution suitably addressing both aspects is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a decoupled transversal security strategy, referred to as DCF, as a novel architectural oriented policy handling the QoS-Security trade-off, particularly designed to be applied to combined fog-to-cloud systems, and specifically highlighting its impact on the delivered QoS.