Department of Computer Technology and Computation, University of Alicante, 03690 Alicante, Spain.
Department of Information Technology, Ghent University, 9052 Ghent, Belgium.
Sensors (Basel). 2018 Sep 23;18(10):3211. doi: 10.3390/s18103211.
Current mobile devices need to run applications with high computational demands and critical response times. The mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm was developed to improve the performance of these devices. This new computation architecture allows for the mobile devices to execute applications on fog nodes at the network edge; this process is called data processing offloading. This article presents a security model for the externalization of application execution in multi-tier MEC environments. The principal novelty of this study is that the model is able to modify the required security level in each tier of the distributed architecture as a function of the degree of trust associated with that tier. The basic idea is that a higher degree of trust requires a lower level of security, and vice versa. A formal framework is introduced that represents the general environment of application execution in distributed MEC architectures. An architecture is proposed that allows for deployment of the model in production environments and is implemented for evaluation purposes. The results show that the security model can be applied in multi-tier MEC architectures and that the model produces a minimal overhead, especially for computationally intensive applications.
当前的移动设备需要运行具有高计算需求和关键响应时间的应用程序。移动边缘计算 (MEC) 范例的开发是为了提高这些设备的性能。这种新的计算架构允许移动设备在网络边缘的雾节点上执行应用程序；这个过程称为数据处理卸载。本文提出了一种用于在多层 MEC 环境中进行应用程序执行外部化的安全模型。这项研究的主要新颖之处在于，该模型能够根据与该层相关联的信任度来修改分布式架构中每个层所需的安全级别。基本思想是，更高的信任度需要更低的安全性，反之亦然。引入了一个正式框架，该框架代表了分布式 MEC 架构中应用程序执行的一般环境。提出了一种架构，允许在生产环境中部署该模型并进行评估目的的实现。结果表明，安全模型可应用于多层 MEC 架构，并且模型产生的开销很小，特别是对于计算密集型应用程序。
