Namespace Tunnels in Content-Centric Networks

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a candidate next-generation Internet architecture that offers an alternative to the current IP-based model. CCN emphasizes scalable and efficient content distribution by making content explicitly named and addressable. It also offers some appealing privacy features, such as lack of source and destination addresses in packets. However, to be considered a fully viable Internet architecture, CCN must support private and anonymous communication that is at least on par with IP. Within this space, a VPN is an important and popular tool that enables users to communicate across insecure public networks as if they were connected over a private network. At present, VPN support is also absent from the repertoire of CCN research. To fill this void, we design, implement and evaluate CCVPN - a content-centric analog to IP-based VPNs of the current Internet architecture. To the best of our knowledge, CCVPN is the first such CCN-based design. Though functionally equivalent to IP-based VPNs, CCVPN offers better privacy due to unlinkability of encapsulated packets to the originating network. We analyze security of CCVPN and experimentally assess its performance.