Harpocrates: Anonymous Data Publication in Named Data Networking

TL;DR

Harpocrates is a framework that allows data producers within censoring networks to publish data anonymously to outside users, effectively bypassing censorship while maintaining user privacy and data integrity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel NDN-based approach for anonymous data publication that addresses the challenge of censorship and producer anonymity in symmetric communication paths.

Findings

Achieves anonymous data publication under various censorship scenarios.

Effectively identifies and adapts to censoring actions.

Maintains data integrity and producer anonymity.

Abstract

Named-Data Networking (NDN), a prominent realization of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) vision, offers a request-response communication model where data is identified based on application-defined names at the network layer. This amplifies the ability of censoring authorities to restrict user access to certain data/websites/applications and monitor user requests. The majority of existing NDN-based frameworks have focused on enabling users in a censoring network to access data available outside of this network, without considering how data producers in a censoring network can make their data available to users outside of this network. This problem becomes especially challenging, since the NDN communication paths are symmetric, while producers are mandated to sign the data they generate and identify their certificates. In this paper, we propose Harpocrates, an NDN-based framework for anonymous data publication under censorship conditions. Harpocrates enables producers in censoring networks to produce and make their data available to users outside of these networks while remaining anonymous to censoring authorities. Our evaluation demonstrates that Harpocrates achieves anonymous data publication under different settings, being able to identify and adapt to censoring actions.