Securing fog computing with a decentralised user authentication approach based on blockchain

Otuekong Umoren, Raman Singh, Zeeshan Pervez*, Keshav Dahal

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    11 Citations (Scopus)
    46 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    The use of low-cost sensors in IoT over high-cost devices has been considered less expensive. However, these low-cost sensors have their own limitations such as the accuracy, quality, and reliability of the data collected. Fog computing offers solutions to those limitations; nevertheless, owning to its intrinsic distributed architecture, it faces challenges in the form of security of fog devices, secure authentication and privacy. Blockchain technology has been utilised to offer solutions for the authentication and security challenges in fog systems. This paper proposes an authentication system that utilises the characteristics and advantages of blockchain and smart contracts to authenticate users securely. The implemented system uses the email address, username, Ethereum address, password and data from a biometric reader to register and authenticate users. Experiments showed that the proposed method is secure and achieved performance improvement when compared to existing methods. The comparison of results with state-of-the-art showed that the proposed authentication system consumed up to 30% fewer resources in transaction and execution cost; however, there was an increase of up to 30% in miner fees.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article number3956
    Number of pages21
    JournalSensors
    Volume22
    Issue number10
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 23 May 2022

    Keywords

    • authentication
    • IoT
    • cloud computing
    • fog computing
    • blockchain technology
    • smart contracts

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