CONFIDENTIAL COMPUTING-BASED ZERO-TRUST ACCESS CONTROL FOR EDGE AND FOG INFRASTRUCTURES

Abstract

The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications has accelerated the deployment of edge and fog infrastructures to support real-time, bandwidth-efficient, and privacy-aware data processing. However, the highly distributed and heterogeneous nature of these environments introduces significant security challenges, particularly related to unauthorized access, insider attacks, and tampering of sensitive data. Traditional perimeter-based security models fail to safeguard modern edge–fog ecosystems where devices, users, and applications cannot be implicitly trusted. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Confidential Computing-Based Zero-Trust Access Control (CC-ZTAC) framework that enforces strict identity-driven authentication and continuous trust verification throughout the data lifecycle. The proposed framework integrates trusted execution environments (TEEs), secure enclaves, remote attestation, and encrypted data processing to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and resilience against adversarial threats. A fine-grained policy-based access control mechanism is adopted to evaluate access requests in real time using contextual device attributes, user behavior, and dynamic risk scores. Experimental analysis across heterogeneous edge–fog nodes demonstrates that the CC-ZTAC framework mitigates privilege escalation, improves resistance to insider threats, and prevents unauthorized data exposure while maintaining low latency overhead and high scalability. The results highlight that confidential computing combined with Zero-Trust principles offers a robust and future-ready security paradigm for critical edge and fog infrastructures.