On the Tradeoff between Performance and User Privacy in Information Centric Networking

Widespread use of caching provides advantages for users and providers, such as reduced network latency, higher content availability, bandwidth reduction and server load balancing. In Information Centric Networking, the attention is shifted from users to content, which is addressed by its name and not by its location. Moreover, the content objects are stored as close as possible to the customers. Therefore, the cache has a central role for the improvement of the network performance but this is strictly related to the caching policy used. However, this comes at the price of increased tracing of users communication and users behavior to define an optimal caching policy. A malicious node could exploit such information to compromise the privacy of users. In this work, we compare different caching policies and we take the first steps for defining the tradeoff between caching performance and user privacy guarantee. In particular, we provide a way to implement prefetching and we define some bounds for the users' privacy in this context.