In contrast to today's IP-based host-oriented Internet architecture, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) emphasizes content by making it directly addressable and routable. Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture is an instance of ICN that is being developed as a candidate next-generation Internet architecture. By opportunistically caching content within the network, NDN appears to be well-suited for large-scale content distribution and for meeting the needs of increasingly mobile and bandwidth-hungry applications that dominate today's Internet. One key feature of NDN is the requirement for each content object to be digitally signed by its producer. Thus, NDN should be, in principle, immune to distributing fake (aka "poisoned") content. However, in practice, this poses two challenges for detecting fake content in NDN routers: (1) overhead due to signature verification and certificate chain traversal, and (2) lack of trust context, i.e., determining which public keys are trusted to verify which content. Because of these issues, NDN does not force routers to verify content signatures, which makes the architecture susceptible to content poisoning attacks. This paper explores root causes of, and some cures for, content poisoning attacks in NDN. In the process, it becomes apparent that meaningful mitigation of content poisoning is contingent upon a network-layer trust management architecture, elements of which we construct, while carefully justifying specific design choices. This work represents the initial effort towards comprehensive trust management for NDN.
With the growing realization that current Internet protocols are reaching the limits of their senescence, several ongoing research efforts aim to design potential next-generation Internet architectures. Although they vary in maturity and scope, in order to avoid past pitfalls, these efforts seek to treat security and privacy as fundamental requirements. Resilience to Denialof-Service (DoS) attacks that plague today’s Internet is a major issue for any new architecture and deserves full attention. In this paper, we focus on DoS in Named Data Networking (NDN) – a specific candidate for next-generation Internet architecture designs. By naming data instead of its locations, NDN transforms data into a first-class entity and makes itself an attractive and viable approach to meet the needs for many current and emerging applications. It also incorporates some basic security features that mitigate classes of attacks that are commonly seen today. However, NDN’s resilience to DoS attacks has not been analyzed to-date. This paper represents a first step towards assessment and possible mitigation of DoS in NDN. After identifying and analyzing several new types of attacks, it investigates their variations, effects and counter-measures. This paper also sheds some light on the debate about relative virtues of self-certifying, as opposed to human-readable, names in the context of content-centric networking. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are an ongoing problem in today's Internet, where packets from a large number of compromised hosts thwart the paths to the victim site and or overload the victim machines. In a newly proposed future Internet architecture, Named Data Networking (NDN), end users request desired data by sending Interest packets, and the network delivers Data packets upon request only, effectively eliminating many existing DDoS attacks. However, an NDN network can be subject to a new type of DDoS attack, namely Interest packet flooding. In this paper we investigate effective solutions to mitigate Interest flooding. We show that NDN's inherent properties of storing per packet state on each router and maintaining flow balance (i.e., one Interest packet retrieves at most one Data packet) provides the basis for effective DDoS mitigation algorithms. Our evaluation through simulations shows that the solution can quickly and effectively respond and mitigate Interest flooding. Named-Data Networking (NDN) is a candidate next-generation Internet architecture designed to address some limitations of the current IP-based Internet. NDN uses the pull model for content distribution, whereby content is first explicitly requested before being delivered. Efficiency is obtained via router- based aggregation of closely spaced requests for popular content and content caching in routers. Although it reduces latency and increases bandwidth utilization, router caching makes the network susceptible to new cache-centric attacks, such as content poisoning. In this paper, we propose a ranking algorithm for cached content that allows routers to distinguish good and (likely) bad content. This ranking is based on statistics collected from consumers' actions following delivery of content objects. Experimental results support our assertion that the proposed ranking algorithm can effectively mitigate content poisoning attacks. Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is an emerging networking paradigm being considered as a possible replacement for the current IP-based host-centric Internet infrastructure. CCN focuses on content distribution, which is arguably not well served by IP. Named-Data Networking (NDN) is an example of CCN. NDN is also an active research project under the NSF Future Internet Architectures (FIA) program. FIA emphasizes security and privacy from the outset and by design. To be a viable Internet architecture, NDN must be resilient against current and emerging threats. This paper focuses on distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks; in particular we address interest flooding, an attack that exploits key architectural features of NDN. We show that an adversary with limited resources can implement such attack, having a significant impact on network performance. We then introduce Poseidon: a framework for detecting and mitigating interest flooding attacks. Finally, we report on results of extensive simulations assessing proposed countermeasure.