NDN DeLorean: an authentication system for data archives in named data networking

Abstract

Named Data Networking (NDN) enables data-centric security in network communication by mandating digital signatures on network-layer data packets. Since the lifetime of some data can extend to many years, they outlive the lifetime of their signatures. This paper introduces NDN DeLorean, an authentication framework to ensure the long-term authenticity of long-lived data. The design of DeLorean takes a publicly auditable bookkeeping service approach to keep permanent proofs of data signatures and the times when the signatures were generated. To assess DeLorean's feasibility the paper presents a set of analytical evaluations on the operational cost as a function of data archive volumes. The paper also identifies several remaining issues that must be addressed in order to make DeLorean a general solution to authenticating long-lived data.