Secure Distribution of Protected Content in Information-Centric Networking
This addresses the problem of balancing security and caching performance in ICN for content distribution, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing encryption methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of content protection in Information-Centric Networking (ICN), where end-to-end encryption hinders caching efficiency, by proposing a Secure Distribution of Protected Content (SDPC) scheme that ensures only authenticated consumers can access content and reduces download delay, as shown in simulation results.
The benefits of the ubiquitous caching in ICN are profound, such features make ICN promising for content distribution, but it also introduces a challenge to content protection against the unauthorized access. The protection of a content against unauthorized access requires consumer authentication and involves the conventional end-to-end encryption. However, in information-centric networking (ICN), such end-to-end encryption makes the content caching ineffective since encrypted contents stored in a cache are useless for any consumers except those who know the encryption key. For effective caching of encrypted contents in ICN, we propose a secure distribution of protected content (SDPC) scheme, which ensures that only authenticated consumers can access the content. SDPC is lightweight and allows consumers to verify the originality of the published content by using a symmetric key encryption. Moreover, SDPC naming scheme provides protection against privacy leakage. The security of SDPC was proved with the BAN logic and Scyther tool verification, and simulation results show that SDPC can reduce the content download delay.