Named Data Networking (NDN), where addressable content name is used, is considered as a candidate of next-generation Internet architectures. NDN routers use In-Network cache to replicate and store passing packets to make faster content delivery. Because NDN uses a human-readable name, it is easy for an adversary to guess what kind of content is requested. To solve this issue, we develop a PEKS-based strategy for forwarding packets, where PEKS stands for public key encryption with keyword search. We implement the PEKS-based strategy based on the best route strategy and multicast strategy of NDN and show the performance of the PEKS-based NDN strategy. We also discuss the issues of the PEKS-based NDN strategy.

NDN is one of the new emerging future internet architectures which brings up new solutions over today’s internet architecture, facilitating content distribution, in-network caching, mobility support, and multicast forwarding. NDNs ubiquitous in-network caching allows consumers to access data directly from the intermediate router’s cache. However, it opens content privacy problems since data packets replicated in the router are always accessible by every consumer. Sensitive contents in the routers should be protected and accessed only by authorized consumers. Although the content protection problem can be solved by applying an encryption-based access control policy, it still needs an efficient content distribution scheme with lower computational overhead and content retrieval time. We propose an efficient and secure content distribution (ES_CD), by combining symmetric encryption and identity-based proxy re-encryption. The analysis shows that our proposed scheme achieves content retrieval time reduction up to 20% for the cached contents in our network simulation environment and a slight computational overhead of less than 19 ms at the content producer and 9 ms at the consumer for 2 KB content. ES_CD provides content confidentiality and ensures only legitimate consumers can access the contents during a predefined time without requiring a trusted third party and keeping the content producer always online.

The newly emerging technologies and applications primarily focus on content distribution over the Internet, and a current host-centric TCP/IP Internet architecture becomes infeasible to fulfill this demand. Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the most promising Future Internet architecture that facilitates a content-centric communication model over TCP/IP architecture. NDN supports in-network caching as the main characteristic that provides efficient scalability and minimum latency of content retrieval. Each NDN router possesses a content store table to cache the contents and directly serve the same requests in the future. Content can be cached anywhere in the NDN network, and content security and confidentiality become vital to prevent content access by unauthorized consumers. A hybrid encryption-based access control scheme has been proposed to address content confidentiality concerns by applying symmetric and identity-based proxy re-encryption schemes in NDN. However, it still requires further implementation and evaluation analyses with related schemes to prove that it offers a lower computational overhead and faster content retrieval time while protecting content confidentiality in NDN architecture. This paper conducts an additional experimental study on the scheme and shows some evidence about the reduction of the computational and communication time.