KRB-CCN: Lightweight Authentication and Access Control for Private Content-Centric Networks

Abstract

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is an internetworking paradigm that offers an alternative to today’s IP-based Internet Architecture. Instead of focusing on hosts and their locations, CCN emphasizes addressable named content. By decoupling content from its location, CCN allows opportunistic in-network content caching, thus enabling better network utilization, at least for scalable content distribution. However, in order to be considered seriously, CCN must support basic security services, including content authenticity, integrity, confidentiality, authorization and access control. Current approaches rely on content producers to perform authorization and access control, which is typically attained via public key encryption. This general approach has several disadvantages. First, consumer privacy vis-a-vis producers is not preserved. Second, identity management and access control impose high computational overhead on producers. Also, unnecessary repeated authentication and access control decisions must be made for each content request. (This burden is particularly relevant for resource-limited producers, e.g., anemic IoT devices.)