Securing ICN-Based UAV Ad Hoc Networks with Blockchain

Named data networking (NDN) enables fast and efficient content dissemination in mission-critical unmanned aerial vehicle ad hoc networks (UAANETs); however, its in-network caching mechanism brings a new security challenge: content poisoning. Poisoned content can contaminate the cache on the routers and isolate valid content from the network, leading to performance degradation or denial of service. To mitigate such attacks and enhance network-layer trust of NDN-based UAANETs, this article proposes a novel and systematic framework that integrates interest-key-content binding (IKCB), forwarding strategy, and on-demand verification to efficiently discover poisoned content. To further provide decentralized IKCB store and detect internal attackers, we introduce a lightweight permissioned blockchain system over NDN and develop a scalable adaptive delegate consensus algorithm. Our experimental results have demonstrated that our proposed framework can effectively purge poisoned content with low overhead, and our algorithms achieve great performance to fit UAANETs.