Violating consumer anonymity: geo-locating nodes in Named Data Networking

Named Data Networking (NDN) is an instance of information-centric network architecture designed as a candidate replacement for the current IP-based Internet. It emphasizes efficient content distribution, achieved via in-network caching and collapsing of closelyspaced content requests. NDN also offers strong security and explicitly decouples content from entities that distribute it. NDN is widely assumed to provide better privacy than IP, mainly because NDN packets lack source and destination addresses. In this paper, we show that this assumption does not hold in practice. In particular, we present several algorithms that help locate consumers by taking advantage of NDN router-side content caching. We use simulations to evaluate these algorithms on a large and realistic topology, and validate the results on the official NDN testbed. Beyond locating consumers, proposed techniques can also be used to detect eavesdroppers. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015