Secure Distribution of Protected Content in Information-Centric Networking

Abstract

The benefits of the ubiquitous caching in information centric networking (ICN) are profound; even though such features make ICN promising for content distribution, but it also introduces a challenge to content protection against the unauthorized access. The protection of a content against unauthorized access requires consumer authentication and involves the conventional end-to-end encryption. However, in ICN, such end-to-end encryption makes the content caching ineffective since encrypted contents stored in a cache are useless for any consumers except those who know the encryption key. For effective caching of encrypted contents in ICN, we propose a secure distribution of protected content (SDPC) scheme, which ensures that only authenticated consumers can access the content. SDPC is lightweight and allows consumers to verify the originality of the published content by using a symmetric key encryption. SDPC also provides protection against privacy leakage. The security of SDPC was proved with the Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and Scyther tool verification, and simulation results show that SDPC can reduce the content download delay.