Toward content-centric privacy in ICN

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.

A trust management scheme to secure mobile information centric networks

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.

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 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.

As content distribution over the Internet become more and more popular and important, future Internet architecture requires highly scalable infrastructures to distribute content efficiently. Information-Centric Networks (ICN) was proposed as a kind of important future Internet architecture to facilitate the contents distribution. ICN uses content name as the routing locator has been proposed for efficient contents distribution. In ICN, content is dynamically cached in routers, which is different from traditional content distribution networks that still use IP address as routing locator and cache content at distributed servers, and caching has been identified as a critical component for ICN. This paper proposes a time-based caching mechanism for Service Providers (SPs) to monetize caching. The SPs cache contents of Contents Providers (CPs) for a certain mount of time, depending on the payment from CPs.

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.

Home network (HOMENET) performs multiple important functions such as energy management, multimedia sharing, lighting and climate control in smart grid (SG). In HOMENET there are numerous challenges among which mobility and security are the basic requirements that need to be addressed with priority. The information-centric networking (ICN) is regarded as the future Internet that subscribes data in a content-centric manner irrespective of its location. Furthermore, it has pecial merit in mobility and security since ICN supports in-network caching and self-contained security, these make ICN a potential solution for home communication fabric. This paper aims to apply the ICN approach on HOMENET system, which we called ICN-HOMENET. Then, a proof-of-concept evaluation is employed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed ICN-HOMENET approach in data security, device mobility and efficient content distribution for developing HOMENET system in SG. In addition, we proposed a cost-efficient residential energy management (REM) scheme called ICN-REM scheme for ICN-HOMENET system which encourages consumers to shift the start time of appliances from peak hours to off-peak hours to reduce the energy bills. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to propose an ICN-based REM scheme for HOMENET system. In this proposal, we not only consider the conflicting requests from appliances and domestic power generation, but also think the energy management unit (EMU) should cooperate with measurement sensors to control some specific appliances in some specific conditions. Moreover, the corresponding performance evaluation validates its correctness and effectiveness.

The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm is drastically different from traditional host-centric IP networking. As a consequence of the disparity between the two, the security models are also very different. The security model for IP is based on securing the end-to-end communication link between the communicating nodes whereas the ICN security model is based on securing data objects often termed as Object Security. Just like the traditional security model, Object security also poses a challenge of key management. This is especially concerning for ICN as data cached in its encrypted form should be usable by several different users. Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) alleviates this problem by enabling data to be encrypted under a policy that suits several different types of users. Users with different sets of attributes can potentially decrypt the data hence eliminating the need to encrypt the data separately for each type of user. ABE is a more processing intensive task compared to traditional public key encryption methods hence posing a challenge for resource constrained environments with devices that have low memory and battery power. In this demo we show ABE encryption carried out on a resource constrained sensor platform. Encrypted data is transported over an ICN network and is decrypted only by clients that have the correct set of attributes.

TORAY TARGETS US AND EUROPE FOR SALES

As devices for the Internet of Things (IoT) are typically battery-powered, energy efficiency is a major challenge for IoT networks. In this paper, we leverage the in-network caching of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) to propose a novel cooperative caching scheme, based on the IoT data lifetime and user request rate, to improve the energy efficiency of IoT networks. By caching IoT data at different nodes (such as content routers, base stations, etc.), IoT devices can stay in sleep mode for a larger portion of time and therefore reduce the overall energy consumption. With the help of an auto- configuration mechanism, the proposed IoT data Lifetime-based Cooperative Caching (LCC) scheme can dynamically adapt to the change of request rate. Extensive evaluations were performed and the simulation results show that LCC outperforms existing schemes in terms of total energy consumption reduction (up to 40%) and the reduction in the average number of hops traversed along the path (up to 20%), which is also directly related to the response time. Keywords- Internet of Things (IoT), Cooperative Caching, Information-Centric Network (ICN).

In recent years, the information-centric networking (ICN) concept has been attracting increasing attention of the research community. The aim is to overcome intrinsic inefficiencies of the existing host-to-host communication paradigm, as well as to provide new and enhanced services to mobile and fixed users. A key feature of ICN is the support for in-network content caching. In this paper, we present a new cache-aware routing scheme for ICN. Our scheme takes into account the information about the locations of caches in the network and constructs delivery paths for efficient content dissemination. The proposed approach does not impose additional signaling overhead in the network; while at the same time it is agnostic of the cached contents. The performance of the proposed scheme is verified by simulation studies, which show an up to 50% delay reduction compared to traditional routing approaches.

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.

PTF: Popularity-Topology-Freshness-based caching strategy for ICN-IoT networks

Named Function Networking (NFN) offers to compute and deliver results of computations in the context of Information Centric Networking (ICN). While ICN offers data delivery without specifying the location where these data are stored, NFN offers the production of results without specifying where the actual computation is executed. In NFN, computation workflows are encoded in (ICN style) Interest Messages using the lambda calculus and based on these workflows, the network will distribute computations and find locations. Depending on the use case of the actual network, the decision where to execute a compuation can be different: A resolution strategy running on each node decides if a computation should be forwarded, split into subcomputations or executed locally. This work focuses on the design of resolution strategies for selected scenarios and the online derivation of execution based on network status and history. Starting with a simple resolution strategy suitable for data centers, we focus on improving load distribution within the data center or even between multiple data centers. We have designed resolution strategies that consider the size of input data and the load on nodes, leading to priced plans from which one can select the ones with the least costs. Moreover, we use these plans to create templates: Templates can be used to create a resolution strategy by simulating the using the planning system, tailored to the specific use case at hand. Finally we designed a resolution strategy for edge computing which is able to handle mobile scenarios typical for vehicular networking. This “mobile edge computing resolution strategy” handles the problem of frequent handovers to a sequence of road-side units without creating additional overhead for the non-mobile use case. All these resolution strategies were evaluated using a simulation system and were compared to the state of the art behavior of data center environments and/or cloud configurations. In the case of the vehicular networking strategy, we enhanced existing road-side units and implemented our NFN-based system and plan derivation such that we were able to run and validate our solution in real world tests for mobile edge computing.