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
