Hierarchical Identity Based Cryptography for Security and Trust in Named Data Networking

Abstract

Named Data Networking (NDN) represents an emergent Information-Centric Networking architecture. It treats data as the central element and it leverages in-network caching. With the latter feature, traditional security mechanisms, tied to data location, can no longer be used. That's why a data-centric security model is adopted. This model relies mainly on the addition of a signature to each of the recovered data. However, the signature verification requires the appropriate public key. To trust this key, NDN provides an interesting platform, supporting multiple models. In this paper, we analyze the security and the trust in NDN. We determine the limits of the already proposed solutions. We propose then a security extension that relies on Hierarchical Identity-Based Cryptography (HIBC). This extension better meets the security requirements and it builds trust in the keys used in signature verification. To validate our proposal, it is integrated into the current prototype of NDN and its performance evaluation is provided. This evaluation proves that by adopting our extension, performance is comparable, even better in some cases than plain NDN.