OCDN: Oblivious Content Distribution Networks

TL;DR

OCDN is a system that enables content publishers to distribute content via multiple CDNs while preserving user and content privacy, using a peer-to-peer network to obfuscate data from CDN operators without sacrificing performance.

Contribution

This paper introduces OCDN, a novel architecture that enhances privacy in content distribution by hiding content and user identities from CDNs while maintaining compatibility and performance.

Findings

OCDN effectively obfuscates content and user identities from CDN operators.

The prototype demonstrates good performance with privacy guarantees.

OCDN supports existing web infrastructure and multi-CDN deployment.

Abstract

As publishers increasingly use Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) to distribute content across geographically diverse networks, CDNs themselves are becoming unwitting targets of requests for both access to user data and content takedown. From copyright infringement to moderation of online speech, CDNs have found themselves at the forefront of many recent legal quandaries. At the heart of the tension, however, is the fact that CDNs have rich information both about the content they are serving and the users who are requesting that content. This paper offers a technical contribution that is relevant to this ongoing tension with the design of an Oblivious CDN (OCDN); the system is both compatible with the existing Web ecosystem of publishers and clients and hides from the CDN both the content it is serving and the users who are requesting that content. OCDN is compatible with the way that publishers currently host content on CDNs. Using OCDN, publishers can use multiple CDNs to publish content; clients retrieve content through a peer-to-peer anonymizing network of proxies. Our prototype implementation and evaluation of OCDN show that the system can obfuscate both content and clients from the CDN operator while still delivering content with good performance.