Security and privacy attacks and mitigations in Information-Centric Network

Abstract

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a new approach for a more scalable and effective internet. ICN has many benefits, namely: ubiquitous caching, location-independent content routing and content-centric security. Despite the aforementioned benefits, the network paradigm is not ready to replace the current host-centric network as ICN is relatively new and has many security and privacy flaws. In this paper, an overview of how ICN works is given with its benefits and challenges compared to the host-centric paradigm. The most important state-of-the-art security and privacy attacks are analysed and investigated. Those consist of interest flooding, cache pollution, censorship and timing attack. The existent mitigation methods are also described for each attack. The paper also proposes an improved version of an existing defence mechanism for the timing attack. Lastly, the conclusion is drawn and future work is discussed.