Mandatory Content Access Control for Privacy Protection in Information Centric Networks

Several Information Centric Network (ICN) architectures have been proposed as candidates for the future Internet, aiming to solve several salient problems in the current IP-based Internet architecture such as mobility, content dissemination and multi-path forwarding. In general, security and privacy are considered as essential requirements in ICN. However, existing ICN designs lack built-in privacy protection for content providers (CPs), e.g., any router in an Internet Service Provider in ICN can cache any content, which may result in information leakage. In this paper, we propose Mandatory Content Access Control (MCAC), a distributed information flow control mechanism to enable a content provider to control which network nodes can cache its contents. In MCAC, a CP defines different security labels for different contents, and content routers check these labels to decide if a content object should be cached. To ensure correct enforcement of MCAC, we also propose a design of a trusted architecture by extending existing mainstream router architectures. We evaluate the performance of MCAC in the NS-3 simulator. The simulation results show that enforcing MCAC in routers does not introduce significant overhead in content forwarding.