Andana: Anonymous named data networking application

Content-centric networking — also known as information-centric networking (ICN) — shifts empha-sis from hosts and interfaces (as in today’s Internet) to data. Named data becomes addressable and routable, while locations that currently store that data become ir-relevant to applications. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a large collabora-tive research effort that exemplifies the content-centric approach to networking. NDN has some innate privacy-friendly features, such as lack of source and destina-tion addresses on packets. However, as discussed in this paper, NDN architecture prompts some privacy con-cerns mainly stemming from the semantic richness of names. We examine privacy-relevant characteristics of NDN and present an initial attempt to achieve communi-cation privacy. Specifically, we design an NDN add-on tool, called ANDaNA, that borrows a number of features from Tor. As we demonstrate via experiments, it provides comparable anonymity with lower relative overhead.