Secure producer mobility in information-centric network

Abstract

One of the fundamental requirements of the next generation 5G networks is to support seamless mobility over an heterogeneous access network by design. The shift from host-based to content-based location-independent communication makes Information-Centric Networking (ICN) an appealing technology to provide not only mobility, but also security and storage as native properties of the network architecture. Previous work in ICN literature focused on name-based mobility management solutions and particularly on the challenges of producer mobility, which involves an interaction between forwarding and control plane. In this paper, we consider the security implications of producer mobility in ICN and we highlight the importance of securing producer to network interactions. We focus on the problem of prefix hijacking: a class of attacks that can be exploited to threaten both the security of the ICN networks and the privacy of its users. To prevent this class of attacks, we propose a fully distributed and very low-overhead protocol for name prefix attestation based on hash-chaining. First results show order of magnitudes improvement in verification latency with respect to signature verification, the leading alternative approach to thwart prefix hijacking attacks.