STQ-SCS: An Efficient and Secure Scheme for Fine-Grained Spatial-Temporal Top-\(k\) Query in Fog-Based Mobile Sensor-Cloud Systems

Abstract

With the emergence of the fog computing and the sensor-cloud computing paradigms, end users can retrieve the desired sensory data generated by any wireless sensor network (WSN) in a fog-based sensor-cloud system transparently. However, the fog nodes and the cloud servers may suffer from many kinds of attacks on the Internet and become semitrusted, which threatens the security of query processing in the system. In this paper, we investigated the problem of secure, fine-grained spatial-temporal Top- $k$ query in fog-based mobile sensor-cloud systems (FMSCSs) and proposed a novel scheme named STQ-SCS to tackle the problem based on the virtual grid construction and the size-order encryption-binding techniques. STQ-SCS can preserve the privacy of the sensed data items and their scores and make end users verify the completeness of the query results of fine-grained spatial-temporal Top- $k$ queries with a 100% successful rate even if the fog nodes and the cloud servers are not totally trustworthy. Besides the good security performance, simulation results indicate that STQ-SCS is also an efficient scheme that incurs a much lower communication cost than the state-of-the-art schemes on securing fine-grained spatial-temporal Top- $k$ query in FMSCSs.