Trustworthiness in Fog: A Fuzzy Approach

Trust management issue in cloud domain has been a persistent research topic discussed among scholars. Similar issue is bound to occur in the surfacing fog domain. Although fog and cloud are relatively similar, evaluating trust in fog domain is more challenging than in cloud. Fog's high mobility support, distributive nature, and closer distance to end user means that they are likely to operate in vulnerable environments. Unlike cloud, fog has little to no human intervention, and lack of redundancy. Hence, it could experience downtime at any given time. Thus it is harder to trust fogs given their unpredictable status. These distinguishing factors, combined with the existing factors used for trust evaluation in cloud can be used as metrics to evaluate trust in fog. This paper discusses a use case of a campus scenario with several fog servers, and the metrics used in evaluating the trustworthiness of the fog servers. While fuzzy logic method is used to evaluate the trust, the contribution of this study is the identification of fuzzy logic configurations that could alter the trust value of a fog.