KRB-CCN: Lightweight Authentication & Access Control for Private Content-Centric Networks
This addresses security and privacy issues in CCN for network architects and users, though it is incremental as it adapts Kerberos principles to a new context.
The paper tackles the problem of providing lightweight authentication and access control for private Content-Centric Networks (CCN) by designing KRB-CCN, which separates authentication and authorization authorities to preserve consumer privacy and reduce computational overhead on producers, resulting in producers only needing two symmetric key operations.
Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is an internetworking paradigm that offers an alternative to today's IP-based Internet Architecture. Instead of focusing on hosts and their locations, CCN emphasizes addressable named content. By decoupling content from its location, CCN allows opportunistic in-network content caching, thus enabling better network utilization, at least for scalable content distribution. However, in order to be considered seriously, CCN must support basic security services, including content authenticity, integrity, confidentiality, authorization and access control. Current approaches rely on content producers to perform authorization and access control. This general approach has several disadvantages. First, consumer privacy vis-a-vis producers is not preserved. Second, identity management and access control impose high computational overhead on producers. Also, unnecessary repeated authentication and access control decisions must be made for each content request. These issues motivate our design of KRB-CCN - a complete authorization and access control system for private CCNs. Inspired by Kerberos in IP-based networks, KRB-CCN involves distinct authentication and authorization authorities. By doing so, KRB-CCN obviates the need for producers to make consumer authentication and access control decisions. KRB-CCN preserves consumer privacy since producers are unaware of consumer identities. Producers are also not required to keep any hard state and only need to perform two symmetric key operations to guarantee that sensitive content is confidentially delivered only to authenticated and authorized consumers. Most importantly, unlike prior designs, KRB-CCN leaves the network (i.e., CCN routers) out of any authorization, access control or confidentiality issues. We describe KRB-CCN design and implementation, analyze its security, and report on its performance.