An efficient certificateless blockchain-enabled authentication scheme to secure producer mobility in named data networks

Abstract

Named Data Networking (NDN) aims to establish an efficient content delivery architecture. In NDN, secure and effective identity authentication schemes ensure secure communication between producers and routers. Currently, there is no feasible solution to perform identity authentication of mobile producers in NDNs. Identity authentication schemes in other networks are either weak in security or performance, such as privacy leakage, difficulty to establish cross-domain trust, and long handover delays, and are not fully adaptable to the security requirements of NDNs. Additionally, the mobility of producers was not fully considered in the initial design of NDNs. This paper first revises the structure of packets and routers to support the identity authentication and mobility of producers. On this basis, this paper proposes a secure and efficient certificateless ECC-based producer identity authentication scheme (CL-BPA), which includes initial authentication and re-authentication, aimed at achieving rapid switch authentication and integrating blockchain to solve single-point failure issues. Using the Canetti and Krawczyk (CK) adversarial model and informal security analysis, the proposed CL-BPA scheme is demonstrated to be resistant to anonymity attacks, identity forgery attacks, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed CL-BPA scheme exhibits excellent capabilities in terms of computation delay, communication cost, smart contract execution time, average response delay, and throughput.