Security, Privacy, and Access Control in Information-Centric Networking: A Survey

Abstract

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.

TLDA: An Efficient Two-Layered Data Authentication Mechanism for Content-Centric Networking

“…In the same context, we will focus on the security features that have been guaranteed by the packet authentication mechanism, though there are a number of security issues (in [3], DoS/DDoS, content poisoning, cache pollution, secure naming and routing, application security, and other general security concerns have been summarized as threats against ICN techniques. An authentication mechanism could be used to protect other attacks, but the fundamental goal of an authentication mechanism in CCN is to guarantee the security against the content poisoning attack) since only the authentication mechanism is considered in our approach.…”

“…Content-Centric Networking (CCN) has recently been proposed as one of different types of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) [1][2][3][4][5] to solve the problem of heavy traffic increases and the existing IP-based Internet's problems [1]. In CCN, contents are routed by their own content names rather than IP-addresses and data segments in the contents are stored in network nodes' storage (so-called in-network caching) during transmission for handling future requests rapidly.…”

Modeling content transfer performance in information-centric networking

“…As a new architecture, on one hand, ICN has many advantages over the traditional TCP/IP architecture. On the other hand, ICN also has many research challenges to be solved [11], such as the specific architecture, naming, routing [12], transport [13], caching [14], mobility [15] and security [16].…”

A novel architecture of CCN for better security and applicability

“…Many ICN architectures have been proposed and still being researched. Based on the nature of communication Tourani et al [14] has categorized some common CCN architectures into two models as i) consumer-driven and ii) publish-subscribe. In the consumer driven architectures, the communication is initiated when a user sends a request for a data/content to the network and then the publisher sends the data back or in case of caching the cache sends the reply.…”

“…But this feature could be exploited by attackers by adding unpopular content to the cache and hampering the cache distribution. Two common caches of cache pollution attacks identified are: locality disruption and false locality [14] . In locality disruption attack, the attacked continuously requests unpopular contents to disrupt the locality of the cache by adding new popular contents continuously.…”