Secure Content Distribution with Access Control Enforcement in Named Data Networking

NDN is one of the new emerging future internet architectures which brings up new solutions over today’s internet architecture, facilitating content distribution, in-network caching, mobility support, and multicast forwarding. NDNs ubiquitous in-network caching allows consumers to access data directly from the intermediate router’s cache. However, it opens content privacy problems since data packets replicated in the router are always accessible by every consumer. Sensitive contents in the routers should be protected and accessed only by authorized consumers. Although the content protection problem can be solved by applying an encryption-based access control policy, it still needs an efficient content distribution scheme with lower computational overhead and content retrieval time. We propose an efficient and secure content distribution (ES_CD), by combining symmetric encryption and identity-based proxy re-encryption. The analysis shows that our proposed scheme achieves content retrieval time reduction up to 20% for the cached contents in our network simulation environment and a slight computational overhead of less than 19 ms at the content producer and 9 ms at the consumer for 2 KB content. ES_CD provides content confidentiality and ensures only legitimate consumers can access the contents during a predefined time without requiring a trusted third party and keeping the content producer always online.