Deploying fog-to-cloud towards a security architecture for critical infrastructure scenarios

Abstract

Critical infrastructures are bringing security, and safety for people in terms of healthcare, water, electricity, industry, transportation, etc. The huge amount of data produced by CIs need to be aggregated, filtered, and stored. Cloud computing was merged into the CIs for utilizing cloud data centers as a pay-as-you-go online computing system for outsourcing services for data storage, filtering and aggregating. On the other hand, CIs need real-time processing for providing sophisticated services to people. Consequently, fog computing is merged into CIs aimed at providing services closer to the users, turning into a smooth real-time decision making and processing. When considering both, that is fog and cloud (for example, deploying the recently coined hierarchical fog-to-cloud F2C concept), new enriched features may be applied to the CIs. Security in CIs is one of the most essential challenges since any failure or attack can turn into a national wise disaster. Moreover, CIs also need to support quality of service (QoS) guarantees for users. Thus, bringing balanced QoS vs security is one of the main challenges for any CI infrastructure. In this paper, we illustrate the benefits of deploying an F2C system in CIs, particularly identifying specific F2C security requirements to be applied to CIs. Finally, we also introduce a decoupled security architecture specifically tailored to CIs that can bring security with reasonable QoS in terms of authentication and key distribution time delay.