Fog-Assisted Blockchain-based Credential Management for Enhanced Trust and Privacy 
Project
What is the focus of your project?
FogBlock4Trust aims at realising a Fog-assisted Blockchain-based credential management solution to strengthen the trust and privacy of users.
Why is a new/better solution needed?
The most important novelty of FogBlock4Trust is the provision of two distinct major services within one framework, namely global institution accreditation, and distributed credential verification. Other recent proposals for credential management are inefficient, unreliable in terms of storage management and privacy AND/OR provide only one of the two services.
How will your solution be better?
The FogBlock4Trust solution is planned as a global institution/provider accreditation and credential verification system. It will support the use of one-way encryption, symmetric and asymmetric encryption, digital signatures, Zero-Knowledge-Proofs, and an improved Proof-of-Signature consensus algorithm. Exploiting these methods and technologies for providing end-users with full privacy preserving distributed accreditation and verification services is the goal of FogBlock4Trust.
Team
The FogBlock4Trust team includes members of the IoT-Cloud research group at the Software Engineering Department of the University of Szeged with corresponding expertise. A senior researcher will lead the FogBlock4Trust project, a PhD student and a post-doc researcher will carry out the development tasks.
Website: iotcloud.sed.hu
Team members:
Attila Kertesz, Project leader, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Attila-Kertesz-2
Hamza Baniata, Blockchain specialist, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hamza-Baniata
Tamas Pflanzner, Cloud, IoT and Web developer, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tamas-Pflanzner
Blockchain experience
The IoT-Cloud research group we have already started to investigate Blockchain (BC), IoT and Fog Computing integration possibilities since 2019. The advantages of BC-Fog integration include enhanced security, integrity, reliability, fault-tolerance, and credibility, thanks to the distribution of processing units of IoT and FC, and the decentralization and trust management mechanisms deployed within the BC algorithms.
First, we performed a survey to highlight the roles the BC played in cloud and fog systems, then proposed a privacy-aware fog-enhanced Blockchain validation approach, in which dedicated, trusted fog nodes can validate data blocks on behalf of blockchain nodes. To perform evaluations of our developed and proposed methods in BC-Fog integration, we started to design a special purpose simulator called FoBSim.
We envision that a BC-assisted fog system can provide computational and storage services, hence the BC placement within the fog architecture may differ. In the FogBlock4Trust project, we aim at developing a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) solution for Fog- and Blockchain-based credential management based on our previous results.