Key Management in Information Centric Networking
International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC), 5 (6):
153-166 (November 2013)Abstract
Information centric networking (ICN) has been in the spotlight of recent research. It is an emerging communication paradigm that relays on the concept of publish and subscribe. It aims to revise the current Internet with a new clean slate architecture where the design is completely different from today’s location based model. To secure the forwarding plan in this network, it is vital to have a time based transient forwarding identifiers by periodically changing the network link identifiers. This assumes shared keys to be distributed prior the communications between an entity termed topology manager (TM) and each forwarder in the network. Exchanging and sharing a secret key between two parties is one of most critical functions in cryptography that needs to be more concerned when integrating cryptographic functions into the system. As ICN is brand new Internet architecture, many existing cryptography protocols may need to be redesigned to fit this new architecture. Therefore, this paper focuses on the security aspect of ICN and proposes an initial design to deploy the integrated Diffie-Hellman-DSA key exchange protocol as a key distributions mechanism.