Mitigating Content Caching Attack in NDN

Abstract

Content caching is a core component in Named Data Networking (NDN), where content is cached in routers and served for future requests. However, the adversary can launch verification attack by placing poisoned data into the network with a legitimate name and allow the routers in the delivery path to frequently identify the content. Since NDN employs digital signature on each piece of content, verifying all content will exhaust routers’ computational resources due to the massive data in the network. In this paper, we propose a selective verification scheme upon the contents that are hit in the content store and allow the contents that are not actually served to be unverified. We also consider the redundant verification of popular content and incorporated in our design to lessen the re-accessing overhead. Analysis and performance results show that the proposed scheme can greatly mitigate the risk of content verification attacks and save the computational resources of relay nodes.