Security, Privacy, and Access Control in Information-Centric Networking: A Survey

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a new networking paradigm, which replaces the widely used host-centric networking paradigm in communication networks (e.g., Internet, mobile ad hoc networks) with an information-centric paradigm, which prioritizes the delivery of named content, oblivious of the contents origin. Content and client security are more intrinsic in the ICN paradigm versus the current host centric paradigm where they have been instrumented as an after thought. By design, the ICN paradigm inherently supports several security and privacy features, such as provenance and identity privacy, which are still not effectively available in the host-centric paradigm. However, given its nascency, the ICN paradigm has several open security and privacy concerns, some that existed in the old paradigm, and some new and unique. In this article, we survey the existing literature in security and privacy research sub-space in ICN. More specifically, we explore three broad areas: security threats, privacy risks, and access control enforcement mechanisms. We present the underlying principle of the existing works, discuss the drawbacks of the proposed approaches, and explore potential future research directions. In the broad area of security, we review attack scenarios, such as denial of service, cache pollution, and content poisoning. In the broad area of privacy, we discuss user privacy and anonymity, name and signature privacy, and content privacy. ICN's feature of ubiquitous caching introduces a major challenge for access control enforcement that requires special attention. In this broad area, we review existing access control mechanisms including encryption-based, attribute-based, session-based, and proxy re-encryption-based access control schemes. We conclude the survey with lessons learned and scope for future work.