The benefits of the ubiquitous caching in information centric networking (ICN) are profound; even though such features make ICN promising for content distribution, but it also introduces a challenge to content protection against the unauthorized access. The protection of a content against unauthorized access requires consumer authentication and involves the conventional end-to-end encryption. However, in ICN, such end-to-end encryption makes the content caching ineffective since encrypted contents stored in a cache are useless for any consumers except those who know the encryption key. For effective caching of encrypted contents in ICN, we propose a secure distribution of protected content (SDPC) scheme, which ensures that only authenticated consumers can access the content. SDPC is lightweight and allows consumers to verify the originality of the published content by using a symmetric key encryption. SDPC also provides protection against privacy leakage. The security of SDPC was proved with the Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic and Scyther tool verification, and simulation results show that SDPC can reduce the content download delay.
In another study @cite_7 , the authors presented an access control scheme for the encrypted content in ICN, which is based on the efficient unidirectional proxy re-encryption (EU-PRE) proposed by @cite_3 . The proposed scheme, named efficient unidirectional re-encryption (EU-RE), simplifies EU-PRE by eliminating the need of proxies in the re-encryption operation. However, the EU-RE scheme is still based on asymmetric cryptography, which is not suitable for several resource constraint applications such as, IoT and sensor networks. Moreover, the authors made an assumption that the content provider behaves correctly, i.e., it does not distribute any private content or decryption rights to unauthorized users. However, this assumption falsifies the protocol claims defined in @cite_20 , which means EU-RE is weak against several attacks. To verify the protocol claims, we implemented EU-RE in an automated security protocol analysis tool, Scyther @cite_10 , and presented the results in .
@cite_10 @cite_3 @cite_20 @cite_7
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Proxy re-encryption (PRE) allows a semi-trusted proxy to convert a ciphertext originally intended for Alice into one encrypting the same plaintext for Bob. The proxy only needs a re-encryption key given by Alice, and cannot learn anything about the plaintext encrypted. This adds flexibility in various applications, such as confidential email, digital right management and distributed storage. In this paper, we study unidirectional PRE, which the re-encryption key only enables delegation in one direction but not the opposite. In PKC 2009, Shao and Cao proposed a unidirectional PRE assuming the random oracle. However, we show that it is vulnerable to chosen-ciphertext attack (CCA). We then propose an efficient unidirectional PRE scheme (without resorting to pairings). We gain high efficiency and CCA-security using the “token-controlled encryption” technique, under the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption, in the random oracle model and a relaxed but reasonable definition. Authentication is one of the foremost goals of many security protocols. It is most often formalised as a form of agreement, which expresses that the communicating partners agree on the values of a number of variables. In this paper we formalise and study an intensional form of authentication which we call synchronisation. Synchronisation expresses that the messages are transmitted exactly as prescribed by the protocol description. Synchronisation is a strictly stronger property than agreement for the standard intruder model, because it can be used to detect preplay attacks. In order to prevent replay attacks on simple protocols, we also define injective synchronisation. Given a synchronising protocol, we show that a sufficient syntactic criterion exists that guarantees that the protocol is injective as well. The Information-centric Network (ICN) paradigm is an important initiative toward an Internet architecture more suitable for content distribution. The change it imposes by naming, routing, and forwarding content directly on the network layer empowers the architecture with several interesting characteristics, such as in-network caching. As contents are meaningful for different users, they can be opportunistically cached and easily accessed by them, which improves content delivery and user experience. However, the fact that users can retrieve content through caches without interacting with the content provider raises security concerns regarding unauthorized access and the enforcement of access control policies. In this context, we propose an access control solution for ICN by adapting and optimizing a proxy re-encryption scheme, reducing up to 33 the processing time. The proposed solution is perfectly aligned with ICN demands, simultaneously ensuring content protection against unauthorized access of contents retrieved from unrestricted in-network caches as well as access control policies enforcement for legitimate users.