Mitigating poisoned content with forwarding strategy

Content poisoning attacks are a significant problem in Information Centric Networks (ICN), such as Named Data Networking. In a content poisoning attack, an attacker injects bogus content into the network with a legitimate name. While users will reject the content because of signature mismatch, the network is largely unaware of the problem due to the computational burden of on the fly packet verification. Thus, subsequent requests may continued to be answered by bogus content and constitute a denial of service attack. While NDN could resist poisoned content by putting restrictions on prefix advertisement, the latter interferes with the \u27content from anywhere\u27 principle, which we consider to be a great advantage of NDN. This work explores the problem of content poisoning in depth and surveys the state of the art in mitigation mechanisms. We then present a novel system for detecting, reporting, and avoiding poisoned content that leverages the verification work that users must do anyways. We also propose the use of evasion strategies: pre-processor modules that assist forwarding strategy in avoiding bad content sources. We evaluate two evasion strategies, Immediate Failover and Probe First, that capture the spectrum of possible solutions to avoiding bad content