Attribute-based access control for ICN naming scheme

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new network architecture that aims to overcome the weakness of existing IP-based networking architecture. Instead of establishing a connection between the communicating hosts, ICN focuses on the content, i.e. data, transmitted in network. Content copies in ICN can be cached at different locations. The content is out of the owner´s control once it´s published. Thus, enforcing access control policies on distributed content copies is crucial in ICN. Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is a feasible approach to enforce such control mechanisms. However, applying ABE in ICN has two challenges: from management perspective, managing attributes is complicated in distributed manners; from privacy perspective, unlike in traditional networks, the enforced content access policies are public to all the ICN users. Thus, it is desirable that unauthorized content viewers are not able to retrieve the access policy. To this end, a privacy-preserving access control scheme for ICN and associated attribute management solution are presented in this paper. This proposed approach is compatible with existing flat name based ICN architectures.