Centrality-based Caching for Privacy in Information-Centric Networks

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a proposal for a future network architecture that shifts from the current end-to-end host based TCP/IP internet architecture by prioritizing content rather than hosts. To this end, ICN relies on in-network caching where routers cache content they have seen with the hope of satisfying future requests for the same content and relieving the original data servers. While in-network caching proved beneficial for a more efficient retrieval of content, it has also caused the emergence of several privacy risks. Timing attacks are one such privacy breach where attackers use timing analysis of data retrievals to analyze users' interests in particular content. In this paper, we propose centrality-based caching to mitigate such attacks and use the anonymity set privacy metric to show that our strategy does provide privacy guarantees. Moreover, our simulations show that we can still achieve high hit rates and low delays while alleviating the network's vulnerability to timing attacks.