Privacy-Aware Caching in Information-Centric Networking

In-network content caching is a key feature of Information Centric Network (ICN), which facilitates efficient content distribution with reduced bandwidth consumption, less network congestion, and improved content retrieval latency. However, this ubiquitous caching of ICN is vulnerable to side-channel timing attack, where the adversary takes advantage of the response time difference between the cached and un-cached contents from the router, to detect if a privacy-sensitive object is cached, or even infer which user requested the object. To mitigate this type of privacy risk in ICN, we propose a differential defense mechanism against distributed timing attack in this paper. Specifically, we design an algorithm based on differential privacy to determine whether a cache-hit or cache-miss is returned for a certain request, which effectively hide the actual cache hit with differential privacy guarantee. Furthermore, a differential delay algorithm for artificial cache miss is implemented based on Laplace mechanism of differential privacy. Performance analysis and simulation results show that our scheme is more effective against distributed timing attack and incurs less impact on caching efficiency and delay performance compared with existing defense schemes for ICN.

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.

Information-centric networking (ICN) can bring many benefits to network operators, e.g., in-network request resolution via router's cache, and name-based forwarding. However, creating a smooth migration path from the current IP network to the ICN is a challenging task that must be investigated. Network function virtualization (NFV) is one of the key technologies to achieve this migration because of its flexibility in supporting new network services as software. Nevertheless, when we consider the deployment of ICN services over NFV, two performance issues are found: processing delay of name look-up and computational overhead of the virtual machine. In this paper we propose NFV infrastructure-assisted name-based forwarding by integrating the name look-up into the Open vSwitch. The contributions are twofold: 1) First, we provide a novel look-up scheme that can forward ICN packets without costly longest prefix match searching. 2) Second, we integrate this forwarding scheme into the virtualization infrastructure to mitigate computational overhead.

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.

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.

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.

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is the network of medical devices, hardware infrastructure, and software applications used to connect the healthcare information technology. Massive traffic growth and user expectations cause challenges in the current exhausting models of IoMT data. To reduce the IoMT traffic, Information Centric Network (ICN) is a suitable technique. ICN uses persistent naming multicast communication that reduces the response time. ICN in IoMT provides a promising feature to reduce the overhead due to the distribution of commonly accessed contents. Some parameters such as energy consumption, communication cost, etc., influence the performance of sensors in the IoMT network. Excessive and unbalanced energy consumption degrades the network performance and lifetime. This article presents a framework called Dynamic Cache Scheme (DCS) that implements energy-efficient cache scheduling in IoMT over ICN to reduce network traffic. The proposed framework establishes a balance between the multi-hop traffic and data item freshness. The technique improves the freshness of data; thus, updated data are provided to the end-users via the effective utilization of caching in IoMT. The proposed framework is tested on important parameters, i.e., cache-hit-ratio, stretch, and content retrieval latency. The results obtained are compared with the state-of-the-art models. Results’ analysis shows that the proposed framework outperforms the compared models in terms of cache-hit-ratio, stretch, and content retrieval latency by 59.42%, 32.66%, and 18.8%, respectively. In the future, it is intended to explore the applicability of DCS in more scenarios and optimize further.

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 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.

We design a content-centric privacy scheme for Information-Centric Networking (ICN). We enhance ICN's ability to support data confidentiality by introducing attribute-based encryption into ICN and making it specific to the data attributes. Our approach is unusual in that it preserves ICN's goal to decouple publishers and subscribers for greater data accessibility, scalable multiparty communication and efficient data distribution. Inspired by application-layer publish-subscribe, we enable fine-grained access control with more expressive policies. Moreover, we propose an attribute-based routing scheme that offers interest confidentiality. A prototype system is implemented based on CCNx, a popular open source version of ICN, to showcase privacy preservation in Smart Neighborhood and Smart City applications.

A survey of Internet of Things communication using ICN: A use case perspective

Wireless information-centric networks consider storage one of the network primitives, and propose to cache data within the network in order to improve latency to access content and reduce bandwidth consumption. We study the throughput capacity of an information-centric network when the data cached in each node has a limited lifetime. The results show that with some fixed request and cache expiration rates, the network can have the maximum throughput order of 1/√n and 1/log n in cases of grid and random networks, respectively. Comparing these values with the corresponding throughput with no cache capability (1/n and 1/√(n log n) respectively), we can actually quantify the asymptotic advantage of caching. Moreover, since the request rates will decrease as a result of increasing download delays, increasing the content lifetimes according to the network growth may result in higher throughput capacities.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a prominent topic in current networking research. ICN design significantly considers the increased demand of scalable and efficient content distribution for Future Internet. However, intermittently connected mobile environments or disruptive networks present a significant challenge to ICN deployment. In this context, delay tolerant networking (DTN) architecture is an initiative that effectively deals with network disruptions. Among all ICN proposals, Content Centric Networking (CCN) is gaining more and more interest for its architectural design, but still has the limitation in highly disruptive environment. In this paper, we design a protocol stack referred as CCNDTN which integrates DTN architecture in the native CCN to deal with network disruption. We also present the implementation details of the proposed CCNDTN. We extend CCN routing strategies by integrating Bundle protocol of DTN architecture. The integration of CCN and DTN enriches the connectivity options of CCN architecture in fragmented networks. Furthermore, CCNDTN can be beneficial through the simultaneous use of all available connectivities and opportunistic networking of DTN for the dissemination of larger data items. This paper also highlights the potential use cases of CCNDTN architecture and crucial questions about integrating CCN and DTN.

Efficient content distribution is a critical challenge in vehicular networks (VANETs). This is due to the characteristics of vehicular networks, such as high mobility, dynamic topologies, short-lived links and intermittent connectivity between vehicles. Recently, information-centric networking (ICN) has been proposed to VANET scenarios for improving content delivery of infotainmentapplications. However, ICN in VANETs suffers from the Interest transmission broadcast problem, which results in a waste of resources and diminishes the performance of VANETs' applications. In this paper, we propose the link stability-based Interest forwarding for content request (LISIC) protocol, in order to tackle the Interest broadcast storm problem during a content search in information-centric VANETs. The proposed protocol controls Interesttransmission by prioritizing neighboring vehicles with more stable links with the current sender. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol improves the content delivery rate by 40% while decreases the Interest packet transmissions by 26%, in scenario of a low number of content producers in the network.

Information-centric networking (ICN) brings in-network caching as a significant characteristic along with its novel network architecture. In-network caching serves as an efficient content distribution strategy in which intermediate routers store and redistribute data to reduce network latency, congestion, and retrieval time. Meanwhile, it decouples contents from the publisher, and content integrity and confidentiality turn out to be problematic. In this study, we propose a mechanism named “in-network secure content management” (ISCM) to facilitate content integrity and authenticity in ICN by exploiting identity-based cryptography (IBC) for content signature verification. In addition, it guarantees content confidentiality by applying a hybrid encryption-based access control mechanism to prevent unauthorized content access and tampering attacks. Evaluation results reveal that ISCM offers secure content retrieval in ICN with a scalable key distribution without significant computational overhead and communication delay.