UC Irvine

Today's Internet is aging. Connections are point-to-point and increasingly

protected by end-to-end encryption. This reduces security to data transport

instead of data itself. Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a paradigm

shift away from this host- and channel-based design. CCN is an

architecture for naming, securing, and transferring named data from

producers to consumers upon request.

Consumers issue interests for named content. Routers forward interests towards

producers capable of providing authentic content with cryptographic

name-to-data bindings. Once found, routers forward content, in reverse,

towards consumers. Routers may also choose to cache content to serve duplicate

future interests. Object security, native authenticity, pull-based data

transfer, flow symmetry, and in-network services are among the notable

characteristics of CCN. In this dissertation, we study security and privacy

issues that stem from these architectural properties. Specifically, we study

variations and facets of access control, privacy risks and remedies, and

network-layer availability attacks and architectural mitigations. For each issue,

we describe the problem in detail and explain several countermeasures. We also present

detailed analyses and experimental assessments for each approach. We find that

sound engineering can mitigate several issues, while others remain insurmountable

challenges exacerbated by fundamental security and performance tradeoffs made by CCN.