Content Delivery Network Security: A Survey

A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed infrastructure to deliver digital contents to end users with high performance. CDNs are critical to provide and protect the availability of Internet contents. However, adversaries can not only evade the CDN protection but also weaponize CDN resources to mount more sophisticated attacks. In this paper, we provide the first survey on CDN security. We categorize CDN security challenges per CDN infrastructure components, discuss possible countermeasures and their effectiveness, and delineate future research directions. This paper aims to highlight the state of CDN security and identify important research challenges in this area.