Information-Centric Networking (ICN) replaces the widely used host-centric networking paradigm in communication networks (e.g., Internet, mobile ad hoc networks) with an information-centric paradigm, which prioritizes the delivery of named content, oblivious of the contents' origin. Content and client security, provenance, and identity privacy are intrinsic in the ICN paradigm versus the current host centric paradigm where they have been instrumented as an after-thought. By design, the ICN paradigm inherently supports many security and privacy features, such as provenance and identity privacy, which are still not effectively available in the host-centric paradigm. However, given its nascency, the ICN paradigm has several open security and privacy concerns. In this article, we survey the existing literature in security and privacy in ICN and present open questions. More specifically, we explore three broad areas: security threats, privacy risks, and access control enforcement mechanisms.We present the underlying principle of the existing works, discuss the drawbacks of the proposed approaches, and explore potential future research directions. In security, we review attack scenarios, such as denial of service, cache pollution, and content poisoning. In privacy, we discuss user privacy and anonymity, name and signature privacy, and content privacy. ICN's feature of ubiquitous caching introduces a major challenge for access control enforcement that requires special attention. We review existing access control mechanisms including encryption-based, attributebased, session-based, and proxy re-encryption-based access control schemes. We conclude the survey with lessons learned and scope for future work.

Abstract-Recent literature suggests that the Internet of Things (IoT) scales much better in an Information-Centric Networking (ICN) model instead of the current host-centric Internet Protocol (IP) model. In particular, the Named Data Networking (NDN) project (one of the ICN architecture flavors) offers features exploitable by IoT applications, such as stateful forwarding, innetwork caching, and built-in assurance of data provenance. Though NDN-based IoT frameworks have been proposed, none have adequately and holistically addressed concerns related to secure onboarding and routing. Additionally, emerging IoT applications such as smart cities require high scalability and thus pose new challenges to NDN routing. Therefore, in this work, we propose and evaluate a novel, scalable framework for lightweight authentication and hierarchical routing in the NDN IoT (NDNoT). Our ns-3 based simulation analyses demonstrate that our framework is scalable and efficient. It supports deployment densities as high as 40,000 nodes/km 2 with an average onboarding convergence time of around 250 seconds and overhead of less than 20 KiB per node. This demonstrates its efficacy for emerging large-scale IoT applications such as smart cities.

No abstract

The fast-growing Internet traffic is increasingly becoming content-based and driven by mobile users, with users more interested in data rather than its source. This has precipitated the need for an information-centric Internet architecture. Research in information-centric networks (ICNs) have resulted in novel architectures, e.g., CCN/NDN, DONA, and PSIRP/PURSUIT; all agree on named data based addressing and pervasive caching as integral design components. With network-wide content caching, enforcement of content access control policies become non-trivial. Each caching node in the network needs to enforce access control policies with the help of the content provider. This becomes inefficient and prone to unbounded latencies especially during provider outages.In this paper, we propose an efficient access control framework for ICN, which allows legitimate users to access and use the cached content directly, and does not require verification/authentication by an online provider authentication server or the content serving router. This framework would help reduce the impact of system down-time from server outages and reduce delivery latency by leveraging caching while guaranteeing access only to legitimate users. Experimental/simulation results demonstrate the suitability of this scheme for all users, but particularly for mobile users, especially in terms of the security and latency overheads.

No abstract