Backscatter from the Data Plane --- Threats to Stability and Security in Information-Centric Networking
This addresses security and stability issues in ICN, a potential future Internet paradigm, but is incremental as it focuses on analyzing existing vulnerabilities rather than proposing a new solution.
The paper analyzes threats to stability and security in Information-Centric Networking (ICN) due to the coupling of control and data planes, demonstrating through theory and experiments how this can be misused to degrade router performance.
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.