Towards name-based trust and security for content-centric network

Abstract

Trust and security have been considered as built-in properties for future Internet architecture. Leveraging the concept of named content in recently proposed information centric network, we propose a name-based trust and security protection mechanism. Our scheme is built with identity-based cryptography (IBC), where the identity of a user or device can act as a public key string. Uniquely, in named content network such as content-centric network (CCN), a content name or its prefixes can be used as public identities, with which content integrity and authenticity can be achieved with IBC algorithms. The trust of a content is seamlessly integrated with the verification of the content's integrity and authenticity with its name or prefix, instead of the public key certificate of its publisher. In addition, flexible confidentiality protection is enabled between content publishers and consumers. For scalable deployment purpose, we further propose to use a hybrid scheme combined with traditional public-key infrastructure (PKI) and IBC. We have implemented this scheme with CCNx open source project on Android.