Privacy in content-oriented networking: threats and countermeasures

Abstract

As the Internet faces scalability, mobility, and security issues, new network architectures are being proposed to better accommodate the needs of modern applications. In particular, Content-Oriented Networking (CON) has attracted considerable attention from the academic and industrial research communities as an alternative future Internet architecture. CON sets to decouple content from hosts at the network layer, by naming data rather than hosts. It comes with a potential for a wide range of benefits, including reduced congestion and improved delivery speed by means of content caching, simpler configuration of network devices, and security at the data level. However, it remains an interesting open question whether or not, and to what extent, this emerging networking paradigm bears new privacy challenges. In this paper, we present a systematic privacy analysis of CON and the common building blocks among its various architectural instances in order to highlight emerging privacy threats, and analyze a few potential countermeasures. Finally, we compare the feasibility and effectiveness of privacy-enhancing technologies in CON as opposed to today’s Internet, and conclude by identifying a list of open research challenges.