Interest-Based Access Control for Content Centric Networks (extended version)
This work addresses access control challenges for sensitive content in CCN, enabling producers to enforce policies without content encryption or key distribution, which is incremental as it builds on existing CCN principles.
The paper tackles the problem of enforcing access control on sensitive content in Content-Centric Networks (CCN) by proposing an Interest-Based Access Control (IBAC) scheme that uses only interest messages, making content names unpredictable to unauthorized parties. It supports hash- and encryption-based obfuscation, addresses replay attacks with a mutual trust framework, and assesses overheads like computational and storage costs.
Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is an emerging network architecture designed to overcome limitations of the current IP-based Internet. One of the fundamental tenets of CCN is that data, or content, is a named and addressable entity in the network. Consumers request content by issuing interest messages with the desired content name. These interests are forwarded by routers to producers, and the resulting content object is returned and optionally cached at each router along the path. In-network caching makes it difficult to enforce access control policies on sensitive content outside of the producer since routers only use interest information for forwarding decisions. To that end, we propose an Interest-Based Access Control (IBAC) scheme that enables access control enforcement using only information contained in interest messages, i.e., by making sensitive content names unpredictable to unauthorized parties. Our IBAC scheme supports both hash- and encryption-based name obfuscation. We address the problem of interest replay attacks by formulating a mutual trust framework between producers and consumers that enables routers to perform authorization checks when satisfying interests from their cache. We assess the computational, storage, and bandwidth overhead of each IBAC variant. Our design is flexible and allows producers to arbitrarily specify and enforce any type of access control on content, without having to deal with the problems of content encryption and key distribution. This is the first comprehensive design for CCN access control using only information contained in interest messages.