Assessing the impact of cryptographic access control solutions on multimedia delivery in information-centric networks

Information-centric Networks (ICN) aims to improve content delivery by promoting the content as the protagonist of the network layer. By naming, routing, and forwarding named content directly on the network layer, ICN allows the same content to satisfy requests from different users, enabling innetwork caches to place contents strategically near the interested users. This characteristic is especially interesting for multimedia content distribution, since it represents a better quality of experience for users due to low round-trip time, bandwidth use, and load on content providers. However, caching protected multimedia content on uncontrolled third party devices may impair access control policies enforcement by the content providers. Many encryption-based access control solutions have been proposed for ICN, applying different cryptographic strategies leading to distinct features which may not be appropriate for multimedia content protection. In this paper, we simulate, evaluate, and discuss the individual characteristics of three encryption-based access control solutions in light of multimedia distribution in ICN. We show that leveraging cache efficiency, computational load to encrypt and decrypt content, and user revocation are the biggest challenges for the enforcement of access control policies on ICN.