A Privacy-Preserving Timing Attacks Mitigation in Information-Centric Edge Networks

In-network caching is one of the most important features of Information-Centric Networking (ICN), which reduces data-retrieval latency, especially at edge networks. However, in-network caching can lead to privacy leakage with timing attacks, i.e., an adversary retrieves cached data and identifies it based on the difference of round trip time (rtt) of cached and non-cached data retrieval. Existing mitigation mechanisms either abandon in-network caching or intentionally add latency to cached data retrieval but fails to prove their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a timing attack mitigation mechanism based on differen-tial privacy exponential mechanism that strictly protects content privacy against timing attacks without significantly increasing the content retrieval delay. Theoretical analysis and evaluation results show that our mechanism protects content privacy effectively at a low cost.