The Producer-Consumer Collusion Attack in Content-Centric Networks

This paper evaluates a denial-of-service attack in information-centric networks based on the Content Centric Networking (CCN) architecture. This attack aims at increasing the content retrieval time. In this attack, both malicious consumers and producers collude, by generating, publishing, and changing content popularity. Malicious contents are stored by intermediate nodes and occupy the cache space that should be occupied by legitimate content. Thus, the probability of a legitimate consumer retrieves content directly from the producer increases as well as the content retrieval time. We evaluate the impact of the attack by varying the number of consumers and producers in collusion, the interest packets rate, and the way malicious contents are requested. Results show if 20% of consumers are malicious and send 500 interests/s each, the content retrieval time experienced by legitimate users increases by 20 times, which shows the effectiveness of the attack.