Identity Based Approach Under a Unified Service Model for Secure Content Distribution in ICN

Various schemes have been proposed for secure content delivery and access control in Information-Centric Networks (ICN). However, it is not trivial to compare their performances due to the lack of unified service model and consistent implementation methods. In this paper, a general service model merging publish-subscribe pattern with ICN framework is proposed to enable performance evaluation of different access control schemes or various implementations. In addition, an identity based hybrid approach under this model is designed and analyzed, in which the content to be delivered is encrypted using a symmetric secret key, which is then protected by an identity-based encryption scheme together with the license to play the content, and later distributed to consumers as requested. Finally, this approach and two existing schemes are implemented on a common cryptography library, and evaluated. Test results show that the proposed approach exhibits better performance and higher energy-efficiency in mobile terminals than those existing ones.