A Blockchain-Based Data Life Cycle Protection Framework for Information-Centric Networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) supports efficient data provision and retrieval with in-network caching. The data life cycle over ICN includes atomic data collection, data publication, caching, and retrieval, suffering from various attacks, such as regulation violation and false claim. Existing solutions have not considered regulation compliance and typically focus on the protection of a specific procedure. To solve these problems, we propose a blockchain-based data life cycle protection framework (BDLP), which exploits the transaction and smart contract to provide a trusted and neutral environment in ICN. In BDLP, a special type of node, a data dam blockchain node, is designed to locally control registration and restrict data flow, besides the function of a blockchain node. BDLP consists of five types of transactions (RegT, CollectT, PubT, PayT, and PunT) to achieve accountability and four types of smart contracts (PubSC, PaySC, AccSC, and RepSC) to achieve authentication, regulation compliance, and neutrality. We elaborate on the data retrieval procedure in BDLP and analyze its scalability, demonstrating that BDLP can achieve a low data retrieval permission delay.