The Security Cost of Content Distribution Network Architectures

Content Distribution Network (CDN) architectures face a wide range of security threats. In this paper, we compare the cost of achieving low and high security for different CDN architectures. We reviewed the existing and emerging systems, identified the threats that they face, defined the general security requirements and considered the mechanisms available to meet the requirements. To assess the security cost, we first defined the process for selecting security mechanisms, and then defined the process for ranking the mechanisms for each architecture. The security comparison result clearly shows that the more the cost of providing service is pushed to the end points, the higher the security cost. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first effort to assess a security cost comparison of different CDN architectures. Our work is orthogonal to other studies that try to find ways of reducing the content distribution service cost, rather than quantifying the cost to provide service security.