Toward Privacy-preserving Content Access Control for Information Centric Networking

摘要

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new network architecture that aims to overcome the weakness of existing IP-based end-to-end networking. Instead of knowing the IP address of the communicating party, ICN focuses on the data, i.e. content, transmitted in network. Therefore, how to locate and access the desired content is a crucial issue in ICN. Some existing solutions aim at resolving the content name through a name resolution service, which is similar to the DNS services of Internet. Other solutions are based on route-by- name scheme, which treats content names similar to existing routing protocols using IP addresses. Since the content can be cached in various data storage, it is difficult to enforce content access control policies on various content hosting servers. As a result, using Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is a flexible approach to enforce the content access policies regardless the security mechanisms provided by different content hosting servers. However, using ABE has a drawback that the enforced content access policies are known to all the ICN users. It is desirable that only legitimated content viewers are able to reveal the content access policies. To this end, a privacy-preserving content access control scheme is presented in this research for ICN. The presented scheme is compatible with existing flat name based ICN architectures.