Ensuring Content Integrity and Confidentiality in Information-Centric Secure Networks

With the rapid growth of internet traffic, the traditional host-to-host TCP/IP architecture is subject to many service limitations faced with content-oriented applications. Various novel network architectures have been proposed to solve these limitations, among which Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is one of the most prominent. ICN features the decoupling of content (service) from the physical devices storing (providing) it through location-independent naming, and offers inherent enhancement to network performance, such as multicast and in-network caching. ICN in-network caching has been extensively studied, and we believe that it may also be the main incentive for ISPs to deploy ICN. A CDN (content delivery network) is a typical content-oriented network paradigm that aims to provide the fast delivery of content. In this paper, we leverage the advantages of the in-network caching of ICN to enhance the content delivery efficiency of CDN by integrating ICN as a service. First, we present our design of a content delivery network enhanced with ICN, called IECDN. Additionally, we formulate a mathematical model to optimize the performance of our proposed design and conduct a series of evaluations. The results indicate that our proposed design provides significant performance gains while reducing bandwidth consumption and shows better resilience to traffic surge.

Current Internet architecture is becoming inadequate for new requirements of highly scalable and efficient distribution of contents. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is one of the alternatives for the Next Generation Internet (NGI), which focuses mainly on contents. In-network caching is one of the major attributes of ICN, which allows contents to be cached in any ICN node. Any user can access ICN contents from different distributed locations. This attribute maximizes the problem of unauthorized access to ICN contents. In this paper, we propose a Decentralized Access Control Protocol for ICN architectures (DACPI). In this protocol, fewer public messages are needed for access control enforcement between ICN subscribers and ICN nodes than the existing access control protocols. DACPI depends on ICN self-certifying naming scheme. We perform security analysis on DACPI for the following attacks: man-in-the-middle, forward security, replay attacks, integrity, and privacy violations. According to the security analysis, DACPI prevents unauthorized access to ICN contents with fewer messages passed.

Information centric networking (ICN) and software-defined networking (SDN) are two emerging networking paradigms that promise to solve different aspects of networking problems. ICN is a clean-slate design for accommodating the ever increasing growth of the Internet traffic by regarding content as the network primitive, adopting in-network caching, and name-based routing, while SDN focuses on agile and flexible network management by decoupling network control logic from data forwarding. ICN and SDN have gained significant research attention separately in the most of the previous work. However, the features of ICN have profound impacts on the design and operation of SDN, such as in-network caching and data-centric security. Conversely, SDN provides a powerful tool for experimenting and deploying ICN architectures and can greatly facilitate ICN functionality and management. In this paper, we point out the necessity of surveying the scattered works on integrating SDN and ICN (SD-ICN) for improving operational networks. Specifically, we analyze the points of SD-ICN strengths and opportunities, and discuss the SDN enablers for deploying ICN architectures. In addition, we review and classify the recent work on improving the network management by SD-ICN and discuss the potential security benefits of SD-ICN. Finally, a number of open issues and future trends are highlighted.

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new and promising network concept which is founded upon the idea that most users in the internet are interested in accessing digital objects, irrespectively of their locations. Digital objects in ICN have unique names that are used in order to route data content from the source node to the destination node. During the content delivery from sources to destinations, the data contents are cached to intermediate nodes in order to achieve efficient and reliable distribution of the data content among the network infrastructure (in-network caching). In this research project we focus on the efficiency of ICN for delivering Big Data with Persistent Identifiers. We proposed a Mapping Architecture for resolving PIDs to ICN names and we evaluate the efficiency of in-network caching when delivering Big Data objects. Our results showed that in-network caching can offer significant performance benefits when the cache size of the network elements that perform in-network caching is bigger than the Big Data object size.

Information-Centric Networks (ICN) see the future architecture of the internet (radical change) by using an information-driven model and integrating from the design the essential functionalities to reach the best performances. Current approaches to ICN employ in-network caching to minimize the latency of information retrieval. Any content distribution over the network will be decided by the caching strategy adopted either along the delivery path or off-path caching. In ICN, caching is a key component essential for improving the quality of service by bringing content as close as possible to customers and reducing network traffic thereby minimizing bottlenecks and waiting time for customers. Software-Defined Networks is characterized by a total separation between the forwarding and control planes, easy network programmability, support for existing applications and architectures, and even for the deployment of new architectures with an open exchange. ICN and SDN are both very active axes proposing solutions for the future architecture of the Internet but with two different starting points. Their integration certainly triggers a promising hybrid solution but generates challenges such as in-network caching and data-centric security functionalities from an SDN perspective. In return, ICN is a radical solution that requires an organizer/supervisor to be deployed on the architectures of existing networks. Because of this, in this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the existing in-network caching mechanisms for CCN and SD-CCN architectures.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a promising candidate architecture for the future internet that leverages the content name instead of the source of the content (host address). ICN decouples the content from its original location and owner, and enables in-network caching at the network layer. Similarly, the inception of ioT has enabled futuristic applications and services in almost every walk of life. Due to the nature of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, traditional TCP/IP-based internet architecture faces challenges such as addressing, heterogeneity, availability, scalability, and resource constraints. Therefore, ICN can be a suitable choice to address these challenges in IoT applications. Among other features of ICN, the in-network caching feature increases the availability and efficiency of content-sharing in IoT networks. Therefore, it is essential to have efficient cache placement strategies in ICN to increase its utility. in this regard, in this article, we propose an ICN cache placement strategy at the edge network for IoT applications. More precisely, we design a distributed cache placement scheme that aims to push the popular content to the edge network and keep the relatively less-popular content at the core. We also propose a collaborative mechanism to fetch content from the nearest neighbor's content-store as well as propose a cache replacement policy based on the content popularity. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the proposed scheme and the obtained results show the efficiency and out-performance against similar strategies in the literature.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) takes advances in content distribution, thanks to the in-network caches which naturally reduce the delay of upper-layer applications. Though attaining high dissemination efficiency, the in-network caching amplifies the challenges in the consistency of cached copies. Since ICN decouples data from the locations, it's hard for ICN to synchronize the caches efficiently once an update occurs, which could lead to potential issues of correctness and security. Herein, we propose a novel cache consistency mechanism based on role division, namely RD-CCM, to achieve strong consistency in ICN. RD-CCM divides network nodes into several roles and applies the Lease model among specific routers to maintain synchronization with high efficiency. We set up an adaptive parametric model to determine the Lease duration of RD-CCM, which balances the cost between storage and communication. Further, we optimize RD-CCM based on content popularity and Invertible Bloom Filter (IBF), diminishing the overhead of synchronization. We simulate RD-CCM on ndnSim to evaluate its performance, compared against Time- To-Live (TTL) and Polling-Every- Time (PET), which are employed in Named Data Networking (NDN). RD-CCM reduces the average hop counts by 32.5% compared against NDN-PET and reduces the cache staleness rate by 59.2% compared against NDN-TTL.

In recent years, information-centric network (ICN) has attracted significant attention from both academia and industry. ICN is characterized by name-based routing, in-network caching and many other advanced network layer techniques. To get the benefit from these new network layer techniques, the network requires severe changes. However, considering the difficulty of deploying a new service on the existing network and the requirement of deploying multiple ICN architectures on the same physical network, the programmability and virtualization of the network is required. The programmability and virtualization techniques can be classified as software-based and hardware-based. The former is represented by software-defined network (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). The latter is headed by NetFPGA. In this paper, we argue, to fully support ICN functionality, we need a unified deployment framework which can provide both software-based and hardware-based programmability and virtualization.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are both new evolving network architectures that are receiving a lot of attention from researchers. ICN is a Future Internet architecture which tries to transform the current Internet architecture from location- and host-centric to content-centric, where obtaining requested data is achieved by the contents’ names regardless of the location of the data. From another angle, SDN is considered a new Internet architecture that moves the control plane management from network devices to a centralized controller. The SDN controller enhances network robustness and improves its scalability, reliability, and flexibility. The integration of ICN and SDN results in massive benefits, where SDN enhances ICN networks’ manageability, controllability, and functionality, and ICN reshapes the SDN design to make it compatible with ICN features and to enhance ICN in terms of network caching, routing, mobility, and security.. In this review paper, a comprehensive survey of the issues and challenges of integrating ICN and SDN is presented. Firstly, ICN’s main characteristics are summarized, and a short comparison between different ICN architectures is completed. Then, the key details of SDN are highlighted. Moreover, the motivation and benefits of merging ICN with SDN are summarized and the state-of-the-art work on merging ICN and SDN is reviewed and classified from several aspects. Finally, several open research issues are highlighted.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is overrunning different domains and applications, where the use of wireless sensors and mobile devices is indispensable in such a mobile environment. These heterogeneous devices may generate a tremendous amount of content. Information-Centric Network (ICN) paradigm has been proposed to meet today’s users and application requirements. The in-network caching is a fundamental feature supported by design in ICN that improves network performance by providing ubiquitous caching in the network layer. Since most IoT devices are resource-constrained with limitations in communication, processing, energy, and memory; the energy-efficiency is a prime concern in IoT deployment. Different factors may affect energy efficiency in ICN-based wireless IoT networks such as transport (communication), caching, and energy limitation. This research paper attempts to focus on the in-network caching in wireless IoT to maximize the energy-efficiency. We propose an Energy-aware caching placement scheme (EaCP) that aims to maximize the energy-saving by trading-off between content transmission energy and content caching energy. Compared to other strategies, the simulation results show significant improvements while ensuring low data replication and a high cache hit ratio.

The growing demand for video streaming is straining the Internet, and mandating a fundamental change in future networking paradigms. Current advancements in Information-centric Networks (ICN) promise a novel approach to intrinsically handling content dissemination, caching and retrieval. While streaming technologies are converging towards Dynamic Adaptive Streaming (DAS), in-network caching in ICN facilitates serving users with better video qualities, potentially beyond their actual bandwidth-mandated throughput. In this paper, we propose an assessment framework for adaptive video streaming to evaluate the performance of ICN caching schemes, and measure their impact on improving users' streaming experience. We present a thorough study of core performance metrics and adopt those metrics which are designed for video caching. We conduct experiments on a NS-3 based simulator, ndnSIM, and propose insights which will aid the development of future caching schemes that cater to inevitable bitrate variations.

Information-Centric Networks (ICN) is a communication paradigm that promises to transfer the Internet from a host-to-host communication network to a massive information delivery system, capable of supporting the future needs of the users. ICNs are based on three main concepts: content forwarding, in-network caching, and multicasting. To realize these three key concepts, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as an important potential candidate, due to its ability to implement all network intelligence in a reprogrammable device known as the controller. However, the integration of these two networking paradigms presents many challenges. This paper studies these challenges and highlights key areas where more effort is needed from the research community. Particularly, the paper focuses on the architectural modifications necessary to incorporate SDN in ICN architectures, including the necessary modifications to the popular OpenFlow protocol. In addition, the paper studies several implementation challenges arising from the integration of SDN and ICN such as the need for a scalable and distributed SDN control that is highly responsive in meeting dynamic user requests, and the need for a semantic naming scheme for content that provides the users with a large degree of expressiveness in specifying their requests. The paper surveys key research efforts that address these challenges and highlights some promising solutions and open research problems therein.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is receiving attention as an emerging network technology. Due to its attractive features, such as accessing content by its name, in-network caching, etc., ICN is expected to apply essentially to the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT applications typically collect a large amount of data widely distributed in various locations. For such usage, we proposed the architecture of Keyword-Based Content Retrieval (KBCR) in a previous paper, as an extension of ICN. In KBCR, a requester sends one request with some keywords, and can receive related content in one response. In this paper, we describe the implementation and performance evaluation of KBCR, and show the feasibility and efficiency of it. For implementation, we implemented KBCR protocol in our testbed system to confirm its functions and developed a demonstration application to show its effectiveness. For performance evaluation, we compared KBCR and NDN by queueing analysis using measured data on the prototype, and showed that KBCR provides better performance both in a requester load and the network delay/throughput.

Fog-based caching mechanism for IoT data in information centric network using prioritization

Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS) use an underlying communication network to collect and analyze data from devices in the power grid, aimed to improve grid operations. For WAMS to be effective, the communication network needs to support low packet latency and low packet losses. Internet Protocol (IP), the pervasive technology used in today's communication networks uses loop-free best-paths for data forwarding, which increases the load on these paths causing delays and losses in delivery. Information-Centric Networking (ICN), a new networking paradigm, designed to enable a data-centric information sharing, natively supports the concurrent use of multiple transmission interfaces, in-networking caching, as well as per-packet security and can provide better application support. In this paper, we present iCASM, an ICN-based network architecture for wide area smart grid communications. We demonstrate through simulations that iCASM achieves low latency and 100% data delivery even during network congestion by leveraging multiple available paths; thus significantly improving communication resiliency in comparison to an IP-based approach. iCASM can be used immediately on today's Internet as an overlay.