TrackFed: An Efficient Connection Tracking Protocol for Federated Identity Management in Heterogeneous Fog Computing

Federated identity management (FIM) is a promising approach that allows secure access to multiple security domains in heterogenous architecture such as fog computing. Keeping track of users connections in such contexts is however very challenging. Indeed, most of existing solutions do not provide connection auditing across multiple domain and thus cannot be adopted in federated identity protocols. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel connection tracking protocol for federated identity management systems in heterogeneous fog computing architecture. Our protocol creates a federation among multiple heterogeneous security domains and allows to keep track on users connections in a completely decentralized manner. As a result. Based on Blockchain Technology and robust cryptographic signature mechanisms, our protocol ensures an immutable global view of connections history all over the architecture. The Blockchain content is validated through a new distributed and secure consensus mechanism based on identity-based signatures. Allowing then a fast connection verification, recording and tracking, as shown in our performance evaluation.