Securing Information-Centric Networking without negating Middleboxes

TL;DR

This paper adapts TLS for Information-Centric Networking to enhance security while supporting middleboxes, enabling secure session reuse, migration, and lawful interception without compromising end-user privacy.

Contribution

It introduces TLS adaptations for ICN that facilitate secure session management and authorized middlebox interception, addressing security and performance trade-offs.

Findings

TLS can be effectively adapted for ICN environments.

Secure session reuse and migration are feasible in ICN.

Authorized middleboxes can intercept communications lawfully.

Abstract

Information-Centric Networking is a promising networking paradigm that overcomes many of the limitations of current networking architectures. Various research efforts investigate solutions for securing ICN. Nevertheless, most of these solutions relax security requirements in favor of network performance. In particular, they weaken end-user privacy and the architecture's tolerance to security breaches in order to support middleboxes that offer services such as caching and content replication. In this paper, we adapt TLS, a widely used security standard, to an ICN context. We design solutions that allow session reuse and migration among multiple stakeholders and we propose an extension that allows authorized middleboxes to lawfully and transparently intercept secured communications.