Security & Scalability of Content-Centric Networking

By suggesting radical changes to the current Internet, approaches to clean-slate architectures run the risk of introducing new opportunities for attacks. These attacks can range from new forms of denial-of-service to attacks against other users’ privacy. In this thesis, we analyse the architecture proposed by Content-Centric Networking from a security perspective. One security-critical feature of Content-Centric Networking is the introduction of general-purpose caches that are shared by a small number of users. We show how attackers can leverage these caches to monitor what content its users are retrieving. More generally, we argue that there is a tradeoff between network efficiency and user privacy. Countermeasures against cache-based privacy attacks need to carefully explore this tradeoff