Biblio

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is attracting attention as a content distribution method against increasing network traffic. Content distribution in ICN adopts a pull-type communication method that returns data to Interest. However, in this case, the push-type communication method is advantageous. Therefore, the authors have proposed a method in which a server pushes content to reduce the node load in an environment where a large amount of Interest to specific content occurs in a short time. In this paper, we analyze the packet processing delay time with and without the proposed method in an environment where a router processes a large number of packets using a simulator. Simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce packet processing delay time and node load.

Currently, little attention has been carried out to address the feasibility of in-network caching in Information-Centric Networking (ICN) for the design and real-world deployment of future networks. Towards this line, in this paper, we propose a beneficial caching scheme in ICN by storing no more than a specific number of replicas for each content. Particularly, to realize an optimal content distribution for deploying caches in ICN, a content can be cached either partially or as a full-object corresponding to its request arrival rate and data traffic. Also, we employ a utility-based replacement in each content node to keep the most recent and popular content items in the ICN interconnections. The evaluation results show that the proposal improves the cache hit rate and cache diversity considerably, and acts as a beneficial caching approach for network and service providers in ICN. Specifically, the proposed caching mechanism is easy to deploy, robust, and relevant for the content-based providers by enabling them to offer users high Quality of Service (QoS) and gain benefits at the same time.

As the next-generation network architecture, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has emerged as a novel paradigm to cope with the increasing demand for content delivery on the Internet. In contrast to the conventional host-centric architectures, ICN focuses on content retrieval based on their name rather than their storage location. However, ICN is vulnerable to various security and privacy attacks due to the inherent attributes of the ICN architectures. For example, a curious ICN node can monitor the network traffic to reveal the sensitive data issued by specific users. Hence, further research on privacy protection for ICN is needed. This paper presents a practical approach to effectively enhancing the security and privacy of ICN by utilizing Intel SGX, a commodity trusted execution environment. The main idea is to leverage secure enclaves residing on ICN nodes to do computations on sensitive data. Performance evaluations on the real-world datasets demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme. Moreover, our scheme outperforms the cryptography based method.

The disadvantages and inextensibility of the traditional network require more novel thoughts for the future network architecture, as for ICN (Information-Centric Network), is an information centered and self-caching network, ICN is deeply rooted in the 5G era, of which concept is user-centered and content-centered. Although the ICN enables cache replacement of content, an information distribution scheduling algorithm is still needed to allocate resources properly due to its limited cache capacity. This paper starts with data popularity, information epilepsy and other data related attributes in the ICN environment. Then it analyzes the factors affecting the cache, proposes the concept and calculation method of Gene value. Since the ICN is still in a theoretical state, this paper describes an ICN scenario that is close to the reality and processes a greedy caching algorithm named GDGCA (Gene Driven Greedy Caching Algorithm). The GDGCA tries to design an optimal simulation model, which based on the thoughts of throughput balance and satisfaction degree (SSD), then compares with the regular distributed scheduling algorithm in related research fields, such as the QoE indexes and satisfaction degree under different Poisson data volumes and cycles, the final simulation results prove that GDGCA has better performance in cache scheduling of ICN edge router, especially with the aid of Information Gene value.

Information-centric networking (ICN) has played an increasingly important role in the next generation network design. However, to make better use of request-response communication mode in the ICN network, revoke user privileges more efficiently and protect user privacy more safely, an effective access control mechanism is needed. In this paper, we propose IBSS (identity-based secret sharing), which achieves efficient content distribution by using improved Shamir's secret sharing method. At the same time, collusion attacks are avoided by associating polynomials' degree with the number of users. When authenticating user identity and transmitting content, IBE and IBS are introduced to achieve more efficient and secure identity encryption. From the experimental results, the scheme only introduces an acceptable delay in file retrieval, and it can request follow-up content very efficiently.

In recent years, ICN (Information-Centric Networking) has been under the spotlight as a network that mainly focuses on transmitted and received data rather than on the hosts that transmit and receive data. Generally, the communication networks such as ICNs are required to be robust against network failures caused by attacks and disasters. One of the metrics for the robustness of conventional host-centric networks, e.g., TCP/IP network, is reachability between nodes in the network after network failures, whereas the key metric for the robustness of ICNs is content availability. In this paper, we focus on an arbitrary ICN network and derive the content availability for a given probability of node removal. Especially, we analytically obtain the average content availability over an entire network in the case where just a single path from a node to a repository, i.e., contents server, storing contents is available and where multiple paths to the repository are available, respectively. Furthermore, through several numerical evaluations, we investigate the effect of the structure of network topology as well as the pattern and scale of the network failures on the content availability in ICN. Our findings include that, regardless of patterns of network failures, the content availability is significantly improved by caching contents at routers and using multiple paths, and that the content availability is more degraded at cluster-based node removal compared with random node removal.

Proliferation of the Internet usage is rapidly increasing, and it is necessary to support the performance requirements for multimedia applications, including lower latency, improved security, faster content retrieval, and adjustability to the traffic load. Nevertheless, because the current Internet architecture is a host-oriented one, it often fails to support the necessary demands such as fast content delivery. A promising networking paradigm called Information-Centric Networking (ICN) focuses on the name of the content itself rather than the location of that content. A distinguished alternative to this ICN concept is Content-Centric Networking (CCN) that exploits more of the performance requirements by using in-network caching and outperforms the current Internet in terms of content transfer time, traffic load control, mobility support, and efficient network management. In this paper, instead of using the saturated method of validating a theory by simulation, we present a testbed-based performance evaluation of the ICN network. We used several new functions of the proposed testbed to improve the performance of the basic CCN. In this paper, we also show that the proposed testbed architecture performs better in terms of content delivery time compared to the basic CCN architecture through graphical results.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has attracted much attention as a promising future network design, which presents a paradigm shift from host-centric to content-centric. However, in edge computing scenarios, there is still no specific ICN forwarding mechanism to improve transmission performance. In this paper, we propose an edge-oriented forwarding mechanism (EFM) for edge computing scenarios. The rationale is to enable edge nodes smarter, such as acting as agents for both consumers and providers to improve content retrieval and distribution. On the one hand, EFM can assist consumers: the edge router can be used either as a fast content repository to satisfy consumers’ requests or as a smart delegate of consumers to request content from upstream nodes. On the other hand, EFM can assist providers: EFM leverages the optimized in-network recovery/retransmission to detect packet loss or even accelerate the content distribution. The goal of our research is to improve the performance of edge networks. Simulation results based on ndnSIM indicate that EFM can enable efficient content retrieval and distribution, friendly to both consumers and providers.

With the increasing diversity of application needs (datacenters, IoT, content retrieval, industrial automation, etc.), new network architectures are continually being proposed to address specific and particular requirements. From a network management perspective, it is both important and challenging to enable evolution towards such new architectures. Given the ubiquity of the Internet, a clean-slate change of the entire infrastructure to a new architecture is impractical. It is believed that we will see new network architectures coming into existence with support for interoperability between separate architectural islands. We may have servers, and more importantly, content, residing in domains having different architectures. This paper presents COIN, a content-oriented interoperability framework for current and future Internet architectures. We seek to provide seamless connectivity and content accessibility across multiple of these network architectures, including the current Internet. COIN preserves each domain's key architectural features and mechanisms, while allowing flexibility for evolvability and extensibility. We focus on Information-Centric Networks (ICN), the prominent class of Future Internet architectures. COIN avoids expanding domain-specific protocols or namespaces. Instead, it uses an application-layer Object Resolution Service to deliver the right "foreign" names to consumers. COIN uses translation gateways that retain essential interoperability state, leverages encryption for confidentiality, and relies on domain-specific signatures to guarantee provenance and data integrity. Using NDN and MobilityFirst as important candidate solutions of ICN, and IP, we evaluate COIN. Measurements from an implementation of the gateways show that the overhead is manageable and scales well.

To accommodate the rapidly changing Internet requirements, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) was recently introduced as a promising architecture for the future Internet. One of the ICN primary features is `in-network caching'; due to its ability to minimize network traffic and respond faster to users' requests. Therefore, various caching algorithms have been presented that aim to enhance the network performance using different measures, such as cache hit ratio and cache hit distance. Choosing a caching strategy is critical, and an adequate replacement strategy is also required to decide which content should be dropped. Thus, in this paper, we propose a content replacement scheme for ICN, called Randomized LFU that is implemented with respect to content popularity taking the time complexity into account. We use Abilene and Tree network topologies in our simulation models. The proposed replacement achieves encouraging results in terms of the cache hit ratio, inner hit, and hit distance and it outperforms FIFO, LRU, and Random replacement strategies.

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising Internet architecture which is expected to solve some problems (e.g., security, mobility) of the current TCP/IP architecture. The basic concept of NDN is to use named data for routing instead of using location addresses like IP address. NDN natively supports consumer mobility, but producer mobility is still a challenge and there have been quite a few researches. Considering the Internet connection such as public transport vehicles, network mobility support in NDN is important, but it is still a challenge. That is the reason that this paper proposes an efficient network mobility support scheme in NDN in terms of signaling protocols and data retrieval.

For future Internet, information-centric networking (ICN) is considered a potential solution to many of its current problems, such as content distribution, mobility, and security. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a more popular ICN project. However, concern regarding the protection of user data persists. Information caching in NDN decouples content and content publishers, which leads to content security threats due to lack of secure controls. Therefore, this paper presents a CP-ABE (ciphertext policy attribute based encryption) access control scheme based on hash table and data segmentation (CHTDS). Based on data segmentation, CHTDS uses a method of linearly splitting fixed data blocks, which effectively improves data management. CHTDS also introduces CP-ABE mechanism and hash table data structure to ensure secure access control and privilege revocation does not need to re-encrypt the published content. The analysis results show that CHTDS can effectively realize the security and fine-grained access control in the NDN environment, and reduce communication overhead for content access.

Media streaming has largely dominated the Internet traffic and the trend will keep increasing in the next years. To efficiently distribute the media content, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has attracted many researchers. Since end users usually obtain content from indeterminate caches in ICN, the publisher cannot reinforce data security and access control depending on the caches. Hence, the ability of self-contained protection is important for the cached contents. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is considered the preferred solution to achieve this goal. However, the existing ABE schemes usually have problems regarding efficiency. The exponentiation in key generation and pairing operation in decryption respectively increases linearly with the number of attributes involved, which make it costly. In this paper, we propose an efficient key-policy ABE with fast key generation and decryption (FKP-ABE). In the key generation, we get rid of exponentiation and only require multiplications/divisions for each attribute in the access policy. And in the decryption, we reduce the pairing operations to a constant number, no matter how many attributes are used. The efficiency analysis indicates that our scheme has better performance than the existing KP-ABE schemes. Finally, we present an implementation framework that incorporates the proposed FKP-ABE with the ICN architecture.

NDN has been widely regarded as a promising representation and implementation of information- centric networking (ICN) and serves as a potential candidate for the future Internet architecture. However, the security of NDN is threatened by a significant safety hazard known as an IFA, which is an evolution of DoS and distributed DoS attacks on IP-based networks. The IFA attackers can create numerous malicious interest packets into a named data network to quickly exhaust the bandwidth of communication channels and cache capacity of NDN routers, thereby seriously affecting the routers' ability to receive and forward packets for normal users. Accurate detection of the IFAs is the most critical issue in the design of a countermeasure. To the best of our knowledge, the existing IFA countermeasures still have limitations in terms of detection accuracy, especially for rapidly volatile attacks. This article proposes a TC to detect the distributions of normal and malicious interest packets in the NDN routers to further identify the IFA. The trace back method is used to prevent further attempts. The simulation results show the efficiency of the TC for mitigating the IFAs and its advantages over other typical IFA countermeasures.

Motivated by ubiquitous surveillance cameras in a smart city, a monitoring service can be provided to citizens. However, the rise of privacy concerns may disrupt this advanced service. Yet, the existing cloud-based services have not clearly proven that they can preserve Wth-privacy in which the relationship of three types of information, i.e., who requests the service, what the target is and where the camera is, does not leak. We address this problem by proposing a content-centric privacy platform (C2P2) that enables the construction of a Wth-privacy-preserving monitoring service without cloud dependency. C2P2 uses an image classification model of a target serving as the key to access the monitoring service specific to the target. In C2P2, communication is based on information-centric networking (ICN) that enables privacy preservation to be centered on the content itself rather than relying on a centralized system. Moreover, to preserve the privacy of bystanders, C2P2 separates the sensitive information (e.g., human faces) from the non-sensitive information (e.g., image background), while the privacy-aware forwarding strategies in C2P2 enable data aggregation and prevent privacy leakage resulting from false positive of image recognition. We evaluate the privacy leakage of C2P2 compared to that of the cloud-based system. The privacy analysis shows that, compared to the cloud-based system, C2P2 achieves a lower privacy loss ratio while reducing the communication cost significantly.

Being the revolutionary future networking architecture, information-centric networking (ICN) conducts network distribution based on content, which is ideally suitable for Internet of things (IoT). With the rapid growth of network traffic, compared to the conventional IoT, information-centric Internet of things (IC-IoT) is expected to provide users with the better satisfaction of the network quality of service (QoS). However, due to IC-IoT requirements of low latency, large data volume, marginalization, and intelligent processing, it urgently needs an efficient content distribution system. In this paper, we propose an edge learning based green content distribution scheme for IC-IoT. We implement intelligent path selection based on decision tree and edge calculation. Moreover, we apply distributed coding based content transmission to enhance the speed and recovery capability of content. Meanwhile, we have verified the effectiveness and performance of this scheme based on a large number of simulation experiments. The work of this paper is of great significance to improve the efficiency and flexibility of content distribution in IC-IoT.

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a novel networking architecture with subscription-based naming mechanism and efficient caching, which has abundant semantic features. However, existing defense studies in ICN fails to isolate or block efficiently novel content threats including malicious penetration and semantic obfuscation for the lack of researches considering ICN semantic features. More importantly, to detect potential threats, existing security works in ICN fail to use semantic reasoning to construct security knowledge-based defense mechanism. Thus ICN needs a smart and content-based defense mechanism. Current works are not able to block content threats implicated in semantics. Additionally, based on traditional computing resources, they are incompatible with ICN protocols. In this paper, we propose smart reasoning based content threat defense for semantics knowledge enhanced ICN. A fog computing based defense mechanism with content semantic awareness is designed to build ICN edge defense system. In addition, smart reasoning algorithms is proposed to detect implicit knowledge and semantic relations in packet names and contents with context communication content and knowledge graph. On top of inference knowledge, the mechanism can perceive threats from ICN interests. Simulations demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed mechanism.

Industrial production plants traditionally include sensors for monitoring or documenting processes, and actuators for enabling corrective actions in cases of misconfigurations, failures, or dangerous events. With the advent of the IoT, embedded controllers link these `things' to local networks that often are of low power wireless kind, and are interconnected via gateways to some cloud from the global Internet. Inter-networked sensors and actuators in the industrial IoT form a critical subsystem while frequently operating under harsh conditions. It is currently under debate how to approach inter-networking of critical industrial components in a safe and secure manner.In this paper, we analyze the potentials of ICN for providing a secure and robust networking solution for constrained controllers in industrial safety systems. We showcase hazardous gas sensing in widespread industrial environments, such as refineries, and compare with IP-based approaches such as CoAP and MQTT. Our findings indicate that the content-centric security model, as well as enhanced DoS resistance are important arguments for deploying Information Centric Networking in a safety-critical industrial IoT. Evaluation of the crypto efforts on the RIOT operating system for content security reveal its feasibility for common deployment scenarios.

In-network caching is a feature shared by all proposed Information Centric Networking (ICN) architectures as it is critical to achieving a more efficient retrieval of content. However, the default "cache everything everywhere" universal caching scheme has caused the emergence of several privacy threats. Timing attacks are one such privacy breach where attackers can probe caches and use timing analysis of data retrievals to identify if content was retrieved from the data source or from the cache, the latter case inferring that this content was requested recently. We have previously proposed a betweenness centrality based caching strategy to mitigate such attacks by increasing user anonymity. We demonstrated its efficacy in a transit-stub topology. In this paper, we further investigate the effect of betweenness centrality based caching on cache privacy and user anonymity in more general synthetic and real world Internet topologies. It was also shown that an attacker with access to multiple compromised routers can locate and track a mobile user by carrying out multiple timing analysis attacks from various parts of the network. We extend our privacy evaluation to a scenario with mobile users and show that a betweenness centrality based caching policy provides a mobile user with path privacy by increasing an attacker's difficulty in locating a moving user or identifying his/her route.

As an extension of Network Function Virtualization, microservice architectures are a promising way to design future network services. At the same time, Information-Centric Networking architectures like NDN would benefit from this paradigm to offer more design choices for the network architect while facilitating the deployment and the operation of the network. We propose $μ$NDN, an orchestrated suite of microservices as an alternative way to implement NDN forwarding and support functions. We describe seven essential micro-services we developed, explain the design choices behind our solution and how it is orchestrated. We evaluate each service in isolation and the entire microservice architecture through two realistic scenarios to show its ability to react and mitigate some performance and security issues thanks to the orchestration. Our results show that $μ$NDN can replace a monolithic NDN forwarder while being more powerful and scalable.

As an extension of Network Function Virtualization, microservice architectures are a promising way to design future network services. At the same time, Information-Centric Networking architectures like NDN would benefit from this paradigm to offer more design choices for the network architect while facilitating the deployment and the operation of the network. We propose μNDN, an orchestrated suite of microservices as an alternative way to implement NDN forwarding and support functions. We describe seven essential micro-services we developed, explain the design choices behind our solution and how it is orchestrated. We evaluate each service in isolation and the entire microservice architecture through two realistic scenarios to show its ability to react and mitigate some performance and security issues thanks to the orchestration. Our results show that μNDN can replace a monolithic NDN forwarder while being more powerful and scalable.

Named Data Networks provide a clean-slate redesign of the Future Internet for efficient content distribution. Because Internet of Things are expected to compose a significant part of Future Internet, most content will be managed by constrained devices. Such devices are often equipped with limited CPU, memory, bandwidth, and energy supply. However, the current Named Data Networks design neglects the specific requirements of Internet of Things scenarios and many data structures need to be further optimized. The purpose of this research is to provide an efficient strategy to route in Named Data Networks by constructing a Forwarding Information Base using Iterated Bloom Filters defined as I(FIB)F. We propose the use of content names based on iterative hashes. This strategy leads to reduce the overhead of packets. Moreover, the memory and the complexity required in the forwarding strategy are lower than in current solutions. We compare our proposal with solutions based on hierarchical names and Standard Bloom Filters. We show how to further optimize I(FIB)F by exploiting the structure information contained in hierarchical content names. Finally, two strategies may be followed to reduce: (i) the overall memory for routing or (ii) the probability of false positives.

The Named-Data Networking (NDN) has emerged as a clean-slate Internet proposal on the wave of Information-Centric Networking. Although the NDN's data-plane seems to offer many advantages, e.g., native support for multicast communications and flow balance, it also makes the network infrastructure vulnerable to a specific DDoS attack, the Interest Flooding Attack (IFA). In IFAs, a botnet issuing unsatisfiable content requests can be set up effortlessly to exhaust routers' resources and cause a severe performance drop to legitimate users. So far several countermeasures have addressed this security threat, however, their efficacy was proved by means of simplistic assumptions on the attack model. Therefore, we propose a more complete attack model and design an advanced IFA. We show the efficiency of our novel attack scheme by extensively assessing some of the state-of-the-art countermeasures. Further, we release the software to perform this attack as open source tool to help design future more robust defense mechanisms.

The emerging Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm is expected to facilitate content sharing among users. ICN will make it easy for users to appoint storage nodes, in various network locations, perhaps owned or controlled by them, where shared content can be stored and disseminated from. These storage nodes should be (somewhat) trusted since not only they have (some level of) access to user shared content, but they should also properly enforce access control. Traditional forms of encryption introduce significant overhead when it comes to sharing content with large and dynamic groups of users. To this end, proxy re-encryption provides a convenient solution. In this paper, we use Identity-Based Proxy Re-Encryption (IB-PRE) to provide confidentiality and access control for content items shared over ICN, realizing secure content distribution among dynamic sets of users. In contrast to similar IB-PRE based solutions, our design allows each user to generate the system parameters and the secret keys required by the underlay encryption scheme using their own \textbackslashemph\Private Key Generator\, therefore, our approach does not suffer from the key escrow problem. Moreover, our design further relaxes the trust requirements on the storage nodes by preventing them from sharing usable content with unauthorized users. Finally, our scheme does not require out-of-band secret key distribution.

Cryptographically-Curated File System (CCFS) proposed in this work supports the adoption of Information-Centric Networking. CCFS utilizes content names that span trust boundaries, verify integrity, tolerate disruption, authenticate content, and provide non-repudiation. Irrespective of the ability to reach an authoritative host, CCFS provides secure access by binding a chain of trust into the content name itself. Curators cryptographically bind content to a name, which is a path through a series of objects that map human meaningful names to cryptographically strong content identifiers. CCFS serves as a network layer for storage systems unifying currently disparate storage technologies. The power of CCFS derives from file hashes and public keys used as a name with which to retrieve content and as a method of verifying that content. We present results from our prototype implementation. Our results show that the overhead associated with CCFS is not negligible, but also is not prohibitive.