Hybrid-Coding Based Content Access Control for Information-Centric Networking

The rapid growth of mobile network traffic poses major challenges for current wireless networks regarding bandwidth, delay, mobility, and stability. To overcome these obstacles, a new network architecture called Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has emerged, effectively addressing these issues and enhancing content delivery efficiency. However, with the in-network content cache, anyone including unauthorized users can access the content from intermediate network nodes. In response to this challenge, this paper proposes an efficient and lightweight ICN content access control framework based on a hybrid-coding mechanism that combines two or more encoding operations, which does not impose additional complexity on ICN routers. In the proposed scheme, the content is first divided into multiple original blocks, and these original blocks are encoded into encoded blocks using hybrid-coding operations. Each authorized user can obtain private decoding information from the content provider, and decode them into original content using its private decoding information. The proposed scheme can fully utilize ICN’s in-network cache capability and defend against a wide range of attacks. Furthermore, security analysis, ndnSIM-based simulation, and real-world experiments demonstrate the scheme’s security, performance, and scalability.