Decentralized Authorization and Privacy-Enhanced Routing for Information-Centric Networks

As information-centric networks are deployed in increasingly diverse settings, there is a growing need to protect the privacy of participants. We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a security framework that achieves this. It ensures the integrity and confidentiality of published content, the associated descriptive metadata, and the interests of subscribers. Publishers can scope access to the content, as well as which nodes in the network can broker access to it. Subscribers can limit which nodes can see their interests. Scopes are defined as policies over attributes of the individual nodes. The system transparently realizes the policies with suitable cryptographic primitives. It supports deployment in heterogeneous mobile ad hoc environments where trust may derive from multiple independent sources. Further, no external public key infrastructure is assumed. We also report on the overhead that the security adds in actual deployments on Android devices.