Security and Privacy of IP-ICN Coexistence: A Comprehensive Survey

Today’s Internet is experiencing a massive number of users with a continuously increasing need for data, which is the leading cause of introduced limitations among security and privacy issues. To overcome these limitations, a shift from host-centric to data-centric is proposed, and in this context, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) represents a promising solution. Nevertheless, unsettling the current Internet’s network layer – i.e., Internet Protocol (IP) – with ICN is a challenging, expensive task since it requires worldwide coordination among Internet Service Providers (ISPs), backbone, and Autonomous Services (AS). Therefore, researchers foresee that the replacement process of the current Internet will transition through the coexistence of IP and ICN. In this perspective, novel architectures combine IP and ICN protocols. However, only a few of the proposed architectures place the security-by-design feature. Therefore, this article provides the first comprehensive Security and Privacy (SP) analysis of the state-of-the-art IP-ICN coexistence architectures by horizontally comparing the SP features among three deployment approaches – i.e., overlay, underlay, and hybrid – and vertically comparing among the ten considered SP features. Lastly, the article sheds light on the open issues and possible future directions for IP-ICN coexistence. Our analysis shows that most architectures fail to provide several SP features, including data and traffic flow confidentiality, availability, and anonymity of communication. Thus, this article shows the secure combination of current and future protocol stacks during the coexistence phase that the Internet will definitely walk across.

I. Introduction

The long journey of the Internet, designed to enable information sharing between a small group of researchers, started in the 1960s under the name ARPANET. Today’s Internet started officially in 1983 with the launch of Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) as a new communication protocol that allowed different networks to communicate. In the last ten years, the Internet has been facing a massive change due to the increasing number of users, several devices used for various purposes, and the need for connectivity everywhere and anytime. According to Cisco [1], 5.3 billion people worldwide used the Internet by 2021, representing 66% of the world’s total population compared to 51% up to 2018. From the same statistics, by 2023, each user will have 3.6 networked devices and connections, while up to 2018, each had 2.4 networked devices. Considering this growing trend, the misalignment between the Internet’s initial and current usage model is becoming more prominent, highlighting several limitations. Such limitations include the availability of unique IP addresses, performance degradation, and Security and Privacy (SP) issues. To mitigate the former limitation, researchers proposed to switch from IPv4 to IPv6 protocol, going from 32 to 128 bits allocated for addressing purposes. Another mitigation was the introduction of Network Address Translation (NAT) [2] that maps different private addresses of devices located in a private network to a single public address through the presence of a firewall. Instead, the performance degradation of the current Internet is related to an ever-increasing number of users and devices used by each of them and their type of traffic. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index [3], IP video traffic has grown three-fold from 2016 to 2021, reaching 227.6 Exabytes/month, while in 2016, it reached 70.3 Exabytes/month. Lastly, due to the lack of security by design, the Internet’s original design fails to provide some requirements—i.e., data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The evolution of Internet Protocol (IP) to Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) was introduced to handle the SP issues found on the Internet over time.