Practical Accounting in Content-Centric Networking (extended version)

TL;DR

This paper proposes secure accounting schemes for Content-Centric Networking (CCN), analyzing their performance and security tradeoffs, and demonstrates that native, secure CCN accounting is practical and more viable than application-specific methods.

Contribution

It introduces new secure accounting schemes for CCN, analyzes their tradeoffs, and shows their practicality over existing application-specific approaches.

Findings

Native and secure CCN accounting is feasible with minimal architecture modifications.

Per-consumer accounting is impossible without application-specific support.

Proposed schemes outperform application-specific approaches in practicality and security.

Abstract

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a new class of network architectures designed to address some key limitations of the current IP-based Internet. One of its main features is in-network content caching, which allows requests for content to be served by routers. Despite improved bandwidth utilization and lower latency for popular content retrieval, in-network content caching offers producers no means of collecting information about content that is requested and later served from network caches. Such information is often needed for accounting purposes. In this paper, we design some secure accounting schemes that vary in the degree of consumer, router, and producer involvement. Next, we identify and analyze performance and security tradeoffs, and show that specific per-consumer accounting is impossible in the presence of router caches and without application-specific support. We then recommend accounting strategies that entail a few simple requirements for CCN architectures. Finally, our experimental results show that forms of native and secure CCN accounting are both more viable and practical than application-specific approaches with little modification to the existing architecture and protocol.