Security and Privacy Challenges in Content-Centric Networks

Today's Internet is aging. Connections are point-to-point and increasinglyprotected by end-to-end encryption. This reduces security to data transportinstead of data itself. Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a paradigmshift away from this host- and channel-based design. CCN is anarchitecture for naming, securing, and transferring named data fromproducers to consumers upon request.Consumers issue interests for named content. Routers forward interests towardsproducers capable of providing authentic content with cryptographicname-to-data bindings. Once found, routers forward content, in reverse,towards consumers. Routers may also choose to cache content to serve duplicatefuture interests. Object security, native authenticity, pull-based datatransfer, flow symmetry, and in-network services are among the notablecharacteristics of CCN. In this dissertation, we study security and privacyissues that stem from these architectural properties. Specifically, we studyvariations and facets of access control, privacy risks and remedies, andnetwork-layer availability attacks and architectural mitigations. For each issue,we describe the problem in detail and explain several countermeasures. We also presentdetailed analyses and experimental assessments for each approach. We find thatsound engineering can mitigate several issues, while others remain insurmountablechallenges exacerbated by fundamental security and performance tradeoffs made by CCN