Lessons Learned Building a Secure Network Measurement Framework using Basic NDN

The Named-Data Networking Project has moved from a multi-university NSF-funded Future Internet Architecture project to an open source codebase with world wide contributors and a growing body of applications. Researchers have applied NDN to applications like lighting control, vehicular communications, and augmented reality but more work is needed to make the data-centric and security features of NDN accessible. Users are currently required to become experts on the internals of the codebase, a difficult task further complicated by the lack of well-documented examples and the project adding new features. While implementing a secure, distributed network measurement framework for NDN, we encountered two major difficulties: the lack of a library of application-usable communications models (built on top of the NDN layer) and the difficulty of integrating trust rules with the NDN codebase. This paper describes our NDN network measurement framework and the co-developed tools that implement its secure, publish/subscribe communications model. Our goals are both to present the network measurement framework and to motivate developers to evolve NDN by creating frameworks, libraries, and includible headers rather than bloating NDN's waist.