Confidentiality, privacy and integrity in content centric networks

Content Centric Networking is one of the proposals for the future internet where the host-centric IP architecture is replaced with content centric. The aim of this architecture is to provide efficient, secure, and reliable dissemination of information. Salient features of CCN are named content, security over automatic content objects, and network caching. The network layer in CCN uses unique names to identify the information objects; this allows the data chunk to be cached at the intermediate nodes which can be retrieved for future purposes. As the data is cached at different nodes in the network, the owner of the data has no control over the cached data at intermediate nodes there by making the data accessible to malicious and unauthorized users. In this thesis, we propose a model in which data cached at different nodes is made secure so that it is accessible only by authorized users, that is, confidentiality of the data is preserved, hence ensuring that the cached data is accessible only by authorized users. For achieving the integrity of the data, we have used message digest of the data. Privacy is ensured using encryption. We have proposed a system where the privacy, confidentiality and integrity is achieved. The overhead in terms of number of additional packets needed for the proposed protocol when compared to the present system decreases as the data size increases. There is also an overhead in terms of the communication hops which increases as the network size increases, albeit at a slower rate.