On the possibility of mitigating content pollution in Content-Centric Networking

Abstract

Content-Centric Networking is an architecture proposal for the future Internet that brings fundamental changes in the way the network operates. Contents are identified and requested based on their names and for security reasons they must be digitally signed by their publishers. Even though this new architecture was designed to be safe, one potential security threat is that malicious publishers may create polluted versions of legitimate contents, reducing their availability and degrading network resources. Because of the non-negligible overhead of checking a large number of signatures, it is not feasible to make it a mandatory task for every router, especially in the network core. In this paper, we propose CCNCheck: a mechanism in which CCN routers probabilistically check the content signatures. We evaluate the mechanism against simulations and found evidences that using CCNCheck increases the fraction of recovered contents and decreases the wastage of network resources.