Interest-Based Access Control for Content Centric Networks (extended version)

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is an emerging network architecture designed to overcome limitations of the current IP-based Internet. One of the fundamental tenets of CCN is that data, or content, is a named and addressable entity in the network. Consumers request content by issuing interest messages with the desired content name. These interests are forwarded by routers to producers, and the resulting content object is returned and optionally cached at each router along the path. In-network caching makes it difficult to enforce access control policies on sensitive content outside of the producer since routers only use interest information for forwarding decisions. To that end, we propose an Interest-Based Access Control (IBAC) scheme that enables access control enforcement using only information contained in interest messages, i.e., by making sensitive content names unpredictable to unauthorized parties. Our IBAC scheme supports both hash- and encryption-based name obfuscation. We address the problem of interest replay attacks by formulating a mutual trust framework between producers and consumers that enables routers to perform authorization checks when satisfying interests from their cache. We assess the computational, storage, and bandwidth overhead of each IBAC variant. Our design is flexible and allows producers to arbitrarily specify and enforce any type of access control on content, without having to deal with the problems of content encryption and key distribution. This is the first comprehensive design for CCN access control using only information contained in interest messages.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure

Modeling Data-Plane Power Consumption of Future Internet Architectures

With current efforts to design Future Internet Architectures (FIAs), the evaluation and comparison of different proposals is an interesting research challenge. Previously, metrics such as bandwidth or latency have commonly been used to compare FIAs to IP networks. We suggest the use of power consumption as a metric to compare FIAs. While low power consumption is an important goal in its own right (as lower energy use translates to smaller environmental impact as well as lower operating costs), power consumption can also serve as a proxy for other metrics such as bandwidth and processor load. Lacking power consumption statistics about either commodity FIA routers or widely deployed FIA testbeds, we propose models for power consumption of FIA routers. Based on our models, we simulate scenarios for measuring power consumption of content delivery in different FIAs. Specifically, we address two questions: 1) which of the proposed FIA candidates achieves the lowest energy footprint; and 2) which set of design choices yields a power-efficient network architecture? Although the lack of real-world data makes numerous assumptions necessary for our analysis, we explore the uncertainty of our calculations through sensitivity analysis of input parameters

Backscatter from the Data Plane --- Threats to Stability and Security in Information-Centric Networking

Information-centric networking proposals attract much attention in the ongoing search for a future communication paradigm of the Internet. Replacing the host-to-host connectivity by a data-oriented publish/subscribe service eases content distribution and authentication by concept, while eliminating threats from unwanted traffic at an end host as are common in today's Internet. However, current approaches to content routing heavily rely on data-driven protocol events and thereby introduce a strong coupling of the control to the data plane in the underlying routing infrastructure. In this paper, threats to the stability and security of the content distribution system are analyzed in theory and practical experiments. We derive relations between state resources and the performance of routers and demonstrate how this coupling can be misused in practice. We discuss new attack vectors present in its current state of development, as well as possibilities and limitations to mitigate them.Comment: 15 page

Efficient Hash-routing and Domain Clustering Techniques for Information-Centric Networks

Hash-routing is a well-known technique used in server-cluster environments to direct content requests to the responsible servers hosting the requested content. In this work, we look at hash-routing from a different angle and apply the technique to Information-Centric Networking (ICN) environments, where in-network content caches serve as temporary storage for content. In particular, edge-domain routers re-direct requests to in-network caches, more often than not off the shortest path, according to the hash-assignment function. Although the benefits of this off-path in-network caching scheme are significant (e.g., high cache hit rate with minimal co-ordination overhead), the basic scheme comes with disadvantages. That is, in case of very large domains the off-path detour of requests might increase latency to prohibitive levels. In order to deal with extensive detour delays, we investigate nodal/domain clustering techniques, according to which large domains are split in clusters, which in turn apply hash-routing in the subset of nodes of each cluster. We model and evaluate the behaviour of nodal clustering and report significant improvement in delivery latency, which comes at the cost of a slight decrease in cache hit rates (i.e., up to 50% improvement in delivery latency for less than 10% decrease in cache hit rate compared to the original hash-routing scheme applied in the whole domain)

Access Control Mechanisms in Named Data Networks:A Comprehensive Survey

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has recently emerged as a prominent candidate for the Future Internet Architecture (FIA) that addresses existing issues with the host-centric communication model of the current TCP/IP-based Internet. Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the most recent and active ICN architectures that provides a clean slate approach for Internet communication. NDN provides intrinsic content security where security is directly provided to the content instead of communication channel. Among other security aspects, Access Control (AC) rules specify the privileges for the entities that can access the content. In TCP/IP-based AC systems, due to the client-server communication model, the servers control which client can access a particular content. In contrast, ICN-based networks use content names to drive communication and decouple the content from its original location. This phenomenon leads to the loss of control over the content causing different challenges for the realization of efficient AC mechanisms. To date, considerable efforts have been made to develop various AC mechanisms in NDN. In this paper, we provide a detailed and comprehensive survey of the AC mechanisms in NDN. We follow a holistic approach towards AC in NDN where we first summarize the ICN paradigm, describe the changes from channel-based security to content-based security and highlight different cryptographic algorithms and security protocols in NDN. We then classify the existing AC mechanisms into two main categories: Encryption-based AC and Encryption-independent AC. Each category has different classes based on the working principle of AC (e.g., Attribute-based AC, Name-based AC, Identity-based AC, etc). Finally, we present the lessons learned from the existing AC mechanisms and identify the challenges of NDN-based AC at large, highlighting future research directions for the community.Comment: This paper has been accepted for publication by the ACM Computing Surveys. The final version will be published by the AC