Anchored Secret Sharing for Access Control with Fast Revocation in Named Data Networking

Named Data Networking (NDN), one typical representative of revolutionary future Internet architectures, enables users to obtain content from everywhere in the network, leveraging ubiquitous in-network caches, which facilitates content sharing more efficiently than the current Internet. However, it becomes a big challenge to implement access control in NDN since it is difficult for a content provider to know when, where and who has retrieved the content. The usual solution is to encrypt the entire content or each packet and then distribute the key to each subscribed user, but the cost of re-encryption to revoke the user is often significant. Inspired by the secret sharing method now commonly used in distributed storage for Big Data, we propose a novel scheme that can enforce access control to the entire content employing a piece of encoded data block, called anchor share. The scheme is thus named anchored secret share, abbreviated as anchor-SS. The performance of anchor-SS as well as its revocation efficiency is analyzed and evaluated. Testing results show that the re-encryption time will be significantly reduced in comparison to the popular approach, nearly inverse proportion to the number of shares.