Elements of Trust in Named-Data Networking

In contrast to today’s IP-based host-oriented Internet ar-chitecture, Content-Centric Networking (CCN) emphasizes content by making it directly addressable and routable. Named Data Networking (NDN) is an instance of CCN designed as a candidate next-generation Internet architecture. By oppor-tunistically caching content within the network (in routers), NDN appears to be well-suited for large-scale content dis-tribution 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 con-tent 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., what pub-lic key(s) is/are trusted to verify which content. Due to these issues, NDN currently 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 trust management architecture, elements of which we construct while carefully justifying specific de-sign choices. This work represents the initial effort towards comprehensive trust management for NDN. 1