Attacks, Detection Mechanisms and Their Limits in Named Data Networking (NDN)

Abstract

Proposals for Information Centric Networking (ICN) have recently emerged to rethink the foundations of the Internet and design a native data-oriented network architecture. Among the current ICN projects, Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising architecture supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NDN communication model is based on the Publish/Subscribe paradigm and focuses on broadcasting and finding content and introduces caching in intermediate routers. Data packets are sent in response to a prior request called an Interest packet and the data are cached along the way to the original requester. Content caching is an essential component of NDN in order to reduce bandwidth consumption and improve data delivery speed, however, this feature allows malicious nodes to perform attacks that are relatively simple to implement but very effective. For that reason, the goal of this paper is to study and classify the types of attacks that can target the NDN architecture such as (Cache Pollution Attack (CPA), Cache Poisoning Attack, Cache Privacy Attack, Interest Flooding Attack (IFA), etc.) according to their consequences in terms of reducing the performance of the network. Moreover, we give an overview about the proposed detection mechanisms and their limitations.