NBP: Namespace-based privacy to counter timing-based attack in named data networking

摘要

NDN is one of the most prominent candidates for the future network. It has a data-centric network architecture in which fetching of content, forwarding requests, and routing is done through the name of the content. Content caching is an essential feature in NDN as its performance depends upon its efficiency of caching contents. Cache in NDN is open for all types of requesters. An attacker can probe an interest packet and find out whether the content corresponding to the interest packet is cached or not by observing the time difference between the timestamps at which the content is received and the request is sent. This attack is called timing-based attack (TBA). Existing solutions for TBA are based on securing individual contents. Therefore, they use large size table, which have data related to each content. Managing these large tables is expensive in terms of space and time. Also, the existing approaches fail to mitigate TBA or can be attacked by the attacker. To counter these limitations a Namespace-Based Privacy (NBP) approach has been proposed for content generation and handling its privacy. Additionally, an approach is proposed which detects the attack pattern at the gateway router itself and triggers the countermeasure in case of attack. The results prove that the proposed approach is better than the existing eminent approaches.