BAS-NDN: BlockChain based mobile producer authentication scheme for Named Data Networking

Abstract

Named Data Network (NDN) is a content-centric, name-based communication architecture, with a push-based communication model naturally supports consumer mobility. However, the management of producer prefix authentication during mobility is challenging due to NDN’s name-based mechanism, which facilitates direct interaction between producers and the forwarding plane. The current solutions fail to balance security and efficiency. To address insecure interactions arising from producer mobility, we introduce a protocol for blockchain-based mobile producer authentication (BAS-NDN). Our protocol relies on a novel elliptic curve-based certificateless signcryption scheme, which is easy to deploy, provides both signature and encryption, and avoids complex certificate management and key escrow problems. This makes it suitable for secure and efficient mobile management in NDN. In addition, the proposed scheme efficiently authenticates the producer’s prefixes by enforcing the producer to publish routing updates that use only valid prefixes. This design renders it resistant to prefix hijacking attacks. Through analyzing under the random oracle model, it is also resistant to both Type I and Type II adversaries present in certificateless signcryption. Finally, experimental analysis indicates that our scheme provides significant performance benefits.