BlockAuth: BlockChain based distributed producer authentication in ICN

Abstract

In Information Centric Networking (ICN), consumer mobility is supported by design in virtue of its connection-less pull-based communication model. However, producer mobility management is challenging as it focuses on the named-based resolution mechanism, which applies a dynamic and direct interaction between the producer and forwarding plane. In this paper, we consider the fundamental security issues related to producer mobility in ICN. These security issues exist mainly due to the insecure interaction of producer with the network’s forwarding information management system. We show that the current mobility solutions lack an adequate security mechanism and they invite severe security threats in the network (e.g., prefix hijacking and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks). To address such security threats, we propose a Blockchain based lightweight distributed mobile producer Authentication (BlockAuth) protocol to enable secure and efficient mobility management in ICN. BlockAuth authenticates the producers’ prefix(es) and enforce them to express only genuine routing updates for the prefix(es) to which they are entitled to advertise. The qualitative security analysis confirms that BlockAuth is robust against various security attacks to which mobile network and blockchain are particularly vulnerable (e.g., prefix hijacking, double spending, DoS attack). Additionally, the performance evaluation of BlockAuth shows that it maintains significant performance gain compared to the state-of-the-art prefix attestation proposals. In particular, it maintains up to 94% of the network’s original throughput, while it needs additional storage of just tens of megabytes.