Investigating the impact of cache pollution attacks in heterogeneous cellular networks

With the growth of Internet-of-Things, mobile data traffic is expected to increase exponentially. To support this rapid growth, heterogeneous cellular networks comprising of femtocells with storage capabilities along with macrocell base stations have been proposed. In this paper, we first investigate the performance impact of a simple randomized cache pollution attack, where the attacker pollutes the cache at the femtocell by requesting unpopular content. We then adopt a principled approach based on the characteristic time of a content in a cache to design an optimized attack strategy. Our experiments show that the proposed attack strategy outperforms the randomized attack with the same attack rate.