Flexible end-to-end content security in CCN

Abstract

Content-centric networking (CCN) project, a flavor of information-centric networking (ICN), decouples data from its source by shifting the emphasis from hosts and interfaces to information. As a result, content becomes directly accessible and routable within the network. In this data-centric paradigm, techniques for maintaining content confidentiality and privacy typically rely on cryptographic techniques similar to those used in modern digital rights management (DRM) applications, which often require multiple consumer-to-producer (end-to-end) messages to be transmitted to establish identities, acquire licenses, and access encrypted content. In this paper, we present a secure content distribution architecture for CCN that is based on proxy re-encryption. Our design provides strong end-to-end content security and reduces the number of protocol messages required for user authentication and key retrieval. Unlike widely-deployed solutions, our solution is also capable of utilizing the opportunistic in-network caches in CCN. We also experimentally compare two proxy re-encryption schemes that can be used to implement the architecture, and describe the proof of concept application we developed over CCNx.