Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is an emerging networking paradigm being
considered as a possible replacement for the current IP-based host-centric
Internet infrastructure. In CCN, named content becomes a first-class entity.
CCN focuses on content distribution, which dominates current Internet traffic
and is arguably not well served by IP. Named-Data Networking (NDN) is an
example of CCN. NDN is also an active research project under the NSF Future
Internet Architectures (FIA) program. FIA emphasizes security and privacy from
the outset and by design. To be a viable Internet architecture, NDN must be
resilient against current and emerging threats. This paper focuses on
distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks; in particular we address interest
flooding, an attack that exploits key architectural features of NDN. We show
that an adversary with limited resources can implement such attack, having a
significant impact on network performance. We then introduce Poseidon: a
framework for detecting and mitigating interest flooding attacks. Finally, we
report on results of extensive simulations assessing proposed countermeasure.Comment: The IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN 2013