Effectiveness of Cache Pollution Attacks in ICN Cache Services

Information-centric networking is a new technique for future Internet. The current Internet architecture was designed based on a host to host communication. In recent years there have been several efforts to replace the current IP-based Internet. The key idea of ICN is that the user will focus more on what exactly they want rather than from where to get the content. Different ICN architectures have developed. CCN (content centric networking), NDN (named data networks) and CDN (content delivery networks) are examples of ICN architectures. ICN has different structure than the host to host networks in terms of naming, routing, security and caching. All these new terms created the chance of new security threats and attacks on network. One of these security threats is possible attacks on ICN cache services. In this Master thesis, we have studied cache pollution attacks on information centric networking and investigated the network performance by comparing the normal system to a system under cache pollution attacks. Delay and path length are the parameters that we have studied in both cases. However, we defined different caching sizes and policies to see the impact of attack, on small network versus large network and later, we extended our research by studying the impact of the attack on network when we have different attack and attack detection probabilities. It intends to tackle the challenges of security concerns on ICN cache services. The evolution of new network architecture raise great challenges to study security attacks on ICN. Therefore, we implemented an ICN architecture with python and we simulated the cache pollution attacks using FIFO and LRU caching policies to analyze the effectiveness of attack on different scale networks. We designed our large network topology inspired by Gnutella's networks which are considered large peer to peer networks.Engineering Technology, Department o