Securing Instrumented Environments over Content-Centric Networking: the Case of Lighting Control
This work addresses secure control for instrumented environments like building automation, offering a novel application of CCN beyond content distribution, though it is incremental as it adapts existing networking paradigms to a specific domain.
The paper tackled securing building automation systems, specifically lighting control, by proposing a security architecture based on Content-Centric Networking (CCN) and Named-Data Networking (NDN), with preliminary implementation and experimental results showing it provides a secure and efficient communication platform.
Instrumented environments, such as modern building automation systems (BAS), are becoming commonplace and are increasingly interconnected with (and sometimes by) enterprise networks and the Internet. Regardless of the underlying communication platform, secure control of devices in such environments is a challenging task. The current trend is to move from proprietary communication media and protocols to IP over Ethernet. While the move to IP represents progress, new and different Internet architectures might be better-suited for instrumented environments. In this paper, we consider security of instrumented environments in the context of Content-Centric Networking (CCN). In particular, we focus on building automation over Named-Data Networking (NDN), a prominent instance of CCN. After identifying security requirements in a specific BAS sub-domain (lighting control), we construct a concrete NDN-based security architecture, analyze its properties and report on preliminary implementation and experimental results. We believe in securing a communication paradigm well outside of its claimed forte of content distribution. At the same time, we provide a viable (secure and efficient) communication platform for a class of instrumented environments exemplified by lighting control.