Leveraging ICN for Secure Content Distribution in IP Networks

Recent studies shows that by the end of 2016 more than 60% of Internet traffic would be running on HTTPS. In presence of secure tunnels such as HTTPS, transparent caching solutions become in vain, as the application payload is encrypted by lower level security protocols. This paper addresses this issue and provides an alternate approach, for contents caching without compromising their security. There are three parts to our proposal. First, we propose two new IP layer primitives that allow routers to differentiate between IP and ICN flows. Second, we introduce DCAR (Dual-mode Content Aware Router), which is a traditional IP router enabled to understand the proposed IP primitives. Third, design of DISCS (DCAR based Information centric Secure Content Sharing) framework is proposed that leverages DCAR to allow content object caching along with security services that are comparable to HTTPS. Finally we share details on realizing such system.