Cache attacks on blockchain based information centric networks: an experimental evaluation

Protecting and securing data that reside at various hosts in the Internet has become more important than ever before because of the growing number of cyber attacks. Though there have been several studies related to denial of service and cache attacks, those studies are primarily based on simulations and investigations of attacks on real networks are still lacking. In this paper, we experimentally investigated the effects of cache attacks on blockchain based information-centric networks. We used the hyperledger fabric to implement the blockchains for small and medium-sized networks. We implemented cache attacks where the attacker target the cache with unpopular content, forcing the user to fetch the data from the web servers. We experimented with two different topologies (linear and mesh) and also considered two cache sizes at the nodes. Three cache replacement policies were used: Least Recently Used, Random, and First In First Out. The cache hit, time taken to get the data, and the number of hops to serve the request were obtained with real network traffic. On the hyperledger fabric framework, we implemented two types of requests and showed how the query delay, invoke delay, and update delay vary with time. Based on our results, we find that most of the information centric networks, including the ones based on blockchains, are vulnerable to cache attacks.