A Survey of Security Attacks in Information-Centric Networking

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a new communication paradigm that focuses on content retrieval from a network regardless of the storage location or physical representation of this content. In ICN, securing the content itself is much more important than securing the infrastructure or the endpoints. To achieve the security goals in this new paradigm, it is crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of ICN attacks, their classification, and proposed solutions. In this paper, we provide a survey of attacks unique to ICN architectures and other generic attacks that have an impact on ICN. It also provides a taxonomy of these attacks in ICN, which are classified into four main categories, i.e., naming, routing, caching, and other miscellaneous related attacks. Furthermore, this paper shows the relation between ICN attacks and unique ICN attributes, and that between ICN attacks and security requirements, i.e., confidentiality, integrity, availability, and privacy. Finally, this paper presents the severity levels of ICN attacks and discusses the existing ICN security solutions.