SLP: A Secure and Lightweight Scheme Against Content Poisoning Attacks in Named Data Networking Based on Probing

Named Data Networking (NDN) stands out as a promising Information Centric Networking architecture capable of facilitating large-scale content distribution through in-network caching and location-independent data access. However, attackers can easily inject poisoned content into the network, called content poisoning attacks, which leads to a substantial deterioration in user experience and transmission efficiency. In existing schemes, routers fail to determine the contamination source of received poisoned content, leading to the inability to accurately identify attacker nodes. Besides, attackers’ dynamic behaviors and network instability could disrupt identification results. In this paper, we propose a Secure and Lightweight scheme against content poisoning attacks based on Probing (SLP), where a proactive and reliable probing protocol is designed to identify adversaries quickly and precisely. In SLP, a router sends specifically chosen interest packets to probe a suspicious node, so that the returned corresponding content can straightly reflect its trustworthiness without other nodes’ interference. In addition, a hypothesis testing algorithm is developed to analyze the returned content, which can exclude the impact of transmission errors and adapt to dynamic attackers. Moreover, we utilize users’ feedback to avoid unnecessary probing costs on unaffected routers, with its reliability guaranteed by an efficient cuckoo-filter-based feedback validation mechanism. Security analysis shows that SLP achieves resistance against content poisoning attacks and malicious feedback. The experimental results demonstrate that SLP makes users hardly be affected by attacks and brings in only slight overhead.