Reliable file transfer protocol with producer anonymity for Named Data Networking

Abstract

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a transmutational construction for the Future Internet equipped toward approaching the Internet’s numerous problems, including content security, content caching, and administration complexity. Security policy in the NDN is based on the digital signatures appended to all the transmitted packets in the NDN. However, a digital signature leaks the identity of the actual producer. To hide the producer’s identity, this paper designs a secure data transmission protocol that ensures the producer’s anonymity in the NDN. The proposed protocol is based on the concepts of Shao et al.’s proxy re-signature and Fan et al.’s methods. Besides, it is formally secured under the intractability of the Decisional Bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption. Feasibility analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol not only inherits the benefits of data confidentiality, supporting unknown potential receivers, and lower storage cost, but also supports the producer’s anonymity with minimal overheads.