CCN framework with privacy support

Abstract

Content-centric networking (CCN) used the name of an Interest to seek the target content, where the name was a plaintext and unprotected. Apart from the name, the content in one Data is also unprotected. If an unauthorised node intercepted an Interest, it could infer what kind of content is requested. If the node intercepted a response Data, it could illegally acquire the content. This study focused on the privacy issues of CCN and proposed a CCN framework with privacy support. In this framework, the concept of a privacy name was proposed and accordingly the forwarding information base (FIB) and pending Interest table (PIT) establishment algorithms based on privacy names were proposed. On the basis of the proposed FIB and PIT, the content communication algorithm based on privacy names was presented. In this algorithm, one authorised consumer could use a privacy name to seek, retrieve and share the ciphertext of the content, so the privacy was achieved. Finally, the privacy of this framework was analysed and the performance was evaluated to justify its advantages.