UC Irvine

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a networking paradigm alternative to today’s IP-based Internet Architecture. One fundamental goal of CCN is to include security and privacy as part of its design. CCN adheres to a simple request and response protocol. Consumers issue interests for named content objects. Routers forward these interests toward content producers. Once the desired content is located, it is returned to the consumer along the same path, in reverse, of corresponding interests. CCN routers can unilaterally cache content to reduce end-to-end latency and bandwidth consumption for future duplicate interests. In this dissertation, we study several security and privacy issues introduced by opportunistic caching in CCN. Specifically, we investigate the influence of caching on consumer and producer privacy, content poisoning attacks, and accounting. For each issue, we describe its root causes, discuss potential countermeasures, and present some experimental results. We conclude that, despite its networking benefits, router caching triggers some important security and privacy problems.