Securing Named Data Networks: Challenges and the Way Forward

Despite decades of research on the Internet security, we constantly hear about mega data breaches and malware infections affecting hundreds of millions of hosts. The key reason is that the current threat model of the Internet relies on two assumptions that no longer hold true: (1) Web servers, hosting the content, are secure, (2) each Internet connection starts from the original content provider and terminates at the content consumer. Internet security is today merely patched on top of the TCP/IP protocol stack. In order to achieve comprehensive security for the Internet, we believe that a clean-slate approach must be adopted where a content based security model is employed. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a step in this direction which is envisioned to be the next generation Internet architecture based on a content centric communication model. NDN is currently being designed with security as a key requirement, and thus to support content integrity, authenticity, confidentiality and privacy. However, in order to meet such a requirement, one needs to overcome several challenges, especially in either large operational environments or resource constrained networks. In this paper, we explore the security challenges in achieving comprehensive content security in NDN and propose a research agenda to address some of the challenges.