Check before storing: what is the performance price of content integrity verification in LRU caching?

In some network and application scenarios, it is useful to cache content in network nodes on the fly, at line rate. Resilience of in-network caches can be improved by guaranteeing that all content therein stored is valid. Digital signatures could be indeed used to verify content integrity and provenance. However, their operation may be much slower than the line rate, thus limiting caching of cryptographically verified objects to a small subset of the forwarded ones. How this affects caching performance? To answer such a question, we devise a simple analytical approach which permits to assess performance of an LRU caching strategy storing a randomly sampled subset of requests. A key feature of our model is the ability to handle traffic beyond the traditional Independent Reference Model, thus permitting us to understand how performance vary in different temporal locality conditions. Results, also verified on real world traces, show that content integrity verification does not necessarily bring about a performance penalty; rather, in some specific (but practical) conditions, performance may even improve