Future Internet Security and Privacy (challenges)

The Internet is an amazing success story, connecting hundreds of millions of users. However, in the last decade, there has been a growing realization that the current Internet Protocol is reaching the limits of its senescence. In fact, the way people access and utilize it has changed radically since the 1970-s when its architecture was conceived.This has prompted several research efforts that aim to design potential next-generation Internet architectures. In particular, Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is an emerging networking paradigm being considered as a possible replacement for the current IP-based host-centric Internet infrastructure. CCN focuses on content distribution, which is arguably not well served by IP. Named-Data Networking (NDN) is an example of CCN. NDN is also an active research project under the NSF Future Internet Architectures (FIA) program. FIA emphasizes security and privacy from the outset and by design. To be a viable Internet architecture, NDN must be resilient against current and emerging threats.

In this talk, we highlight the main security and privacy issues we identified in NDN. Then, as a representative case, we discuss interest flooding, a possible denial-of-service attack that exploits key architectural features of NDN. We show that an adversary with limited resources can implement such attack, having a significant impact on network performance. We then introduce Poseidon: a framework for detecting and mitigating interest flooding attacks. Finally, we report on results of extensive simulations assessing proposed countermeasure.