Name Management Using IOTA in ICN

Information-centric networking (ICN) has received a wide attention as a next-generation network. Unlike conventional IP networks, which forward packets based on IP addresses, ICNs packets are sent based on the name of the contents which are cached to the routers involved, then delivered to the consumer. Since any participating party can upload content to the ICN, the risk of content poisoning attack (CPA) is ever-present. In CPA, an attacker degrades the cache efficiency by uploading fake content under a real name posting as a legitimate publisher. As a countermeasure to CPA, many existing methods determine the legitimacy of content using digital signatures with public keys, and alerts routers of unjustified content upon detection. However, it is difficult for them to detect fake-CPA attacks which use public keys of fabricated content to generate digital signatures. Most methods also lack counter-measures to spoofed fake-CPA attacks, in which the certification authority (CA) that manages the public key or its staff member colludes with the attacker to rewrite the legitimate publisher’s public key to the attacker’s and inject fake contents that pretends to be authentic contents that are high in popularity into the cache. In this paper, we propose a method to prevent the spoofed fake-CPA by managing content names with IOTA, a distributed ledger technology that blocks tampering of contents registered on the system. We also numerically compare the search time and memory requirement of four search methods that search content names managed in the ledger in the proposed method. As a result, we confirm the trade-off between the search time and memory requirement.