# Secure Distribution of Protected Content in Information-Centric Networking

## TL;DR

This paper proposes SDPC, a lightweight scheme for secure content distribution in ICN that ensures only authenticated consumers can access encrypted content, preserving caching benefits and enhancing privacy.

## Contribution

It introduces SDPC, a novel secure distribution scheme for ICN that combines consumer authentication, content verification, and privacy protection with proven security and improved performance.

## Key findings

- SDPC reduces content download delay in ICN.
- SDPC ensures only authenticated consumers access content.
- Security of SDPC verified with BAN logic and Scyther.

## Abstract

The benefits of the ubiquitous caching in ICN are profound, such features make ICN promising for content distribution, but it also introduces a challenge to content protection against the unauthorized access. The protection of a content against unauthorized access requires consumer authentication and involves the conventional end-to-end encryption. However, in information-centric networking (ICN), such end-to-end encryption makes the content caching ineffective since encrypted contents stored in a cache are useless for any consumers except those who know the encryption key. For effective caching of encrypted contents in ICN, we propose a secure distribution of protected content (SDPC) scheme, which ensures that only authenticated consumers can access the content. SDPC is lightweight and allows consumers to verify the originality of the published content by using a symmetric key encryption. Moreover, SDPC naming scheme provides protection against privacy leakage. The security of SDPC was proved with the BAN logic and Scyther tool verification, and simulation results show that SDPC can reduce the content download delay.