Thorough analysis of brute-force attacks on stateless forwarding in information centric networks

Abstract:Information-centric networking (ICN) is an emerging revolutionary technology that has recently gained lots of interest in the research community. ICN aims at solving the inefficiencies of the current Internet by promoting the information objects into the first class citizens. Information-aware routing, caching, and other network functions are expected to boost the network performance and to enable new, advanced services. Nevertheless, the ICN solutions proposed so far are not very mature for the security viewpoint. It has been demonstrated, that the basic ICN mechanisms are vulnerable to brute force and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. In this paper, we first perform a thorough security analysis of one of the most popular ICN Bloom-filter based forwarding mechanisms. Next, we propose a mitigation technique that provides a sufficient level of security against brute-force attacks