Hey, I Know You Are Moving: Producer Movement Status Privacy in Information-Centric Networking

Information-centric networking (ICN), an alternative for future networking architecture, offers great benefits to both consumers and producers from various dimensions, such as scalability, security and mobility. Unlike IP packets containing geographically dependent and host-centric IP addresses, neither ICN interest packets (issued by a content requester or consumer) nor ICN data packets (generated by a content source or producer) by-default leak any geographical information, and thus both consumers' and producers' locations are perfectly hidden if the adversary does not eavesdrop on the network communication. Location privacy, however, does not necessarily imply the privacy of movement status (i.e., whether the object is moving or not) that might open the door to profiling attacks towards producers especially in an IoT-driven era where each individual may act as a producer. In this paper, we are motivated by the following critical questions: (i) Can ICN preserve privacy of the producer's movement status, and (ii) If not, how can we preserve privacy of movement status if a producer is moving. We survey the current ICN mobility mechanisms and find that most of them are vulnerable to attaks on privacy of the movement status. We propose a simple approach that can be used to prevent such attacks. The objective of this paper is to raise the security awareness for network architects/designers when designing mobility support mechanisms.