Nikos Fotiou

A Survey of Information-Centric Networking Research

The current Internet architecture was founded upon a host-centric communication model, which was appropriate for coping with the needs of the early Internet users. Internet usage has evolved however, with most users mainly interested in accessing (vast amounts of) information, irrespective of its physical location. This paradigm shift in the usage model of the Internet, along with the pressing needs for, among others, better security and mobility support, has led researchers into considering a radical change to the Internet architecture. In this direction, we have witnessed many research efforts investigating Information-Centric Networking (ICN) as a foundation upon which the Future Internet can be built. Our main aims in this survey are: (a) to identify the core functionalities of ICN architectures, (b) to describe the key ICN proposals in a tutorial manner, highlighting the similarities and differences among them with respect to those core functionalities, and (c) to identify the key weaknesses of ICN proposals and to outline the main unresolved research challenges in this area of networking research.

Developing Information Networking Further: From PSIRP to PURSUIT

PSIRP (Publish-Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm) is an EU FP7 funded project that has developed a clean-slate architecture for the future Internet, based on the publish-subscribe primitives (rather than the send-receive ones), all the way down to the core networking functions. The PSIRP vision is a pure information-centric Internet architecture, possibly providing remedies to many of the current Internet problems. In PSIRP, all is information and everything is about information. Content-based identities, recursive application of ideas, cryptographic techniques, and the Trust-to-Trust principle are all extensively used to achieve the design goals. Furthermore, incentive compatibility and socio-economic considerations are guiding the design from the outset, to ground the project in reality and to provide credible and viable potential deployment paths. The project has developed, implemented, and preliminarily evaluated solutions for rendezvous, topology formation and routing, and information forwarding, with ongoing work currently focusing in experimenting.

Illustrating a publish-subscribe Internet architecture

The Publish-Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm (PSIRP) project aims at developing and evaluating an information-centric architecture for the future Internet. The ambition is to provide a new form of internetworking which will offer the desired functionality, flexibility, and performance, but will also support availability, security, and mobility, as well as innovative applications and new market opportunities. This paper illustrates the high level architecture developed in the PSIRP project, revealing its principles, core components, and basic operations through example usage scenarios. While the focus of this paper is specifically on the operations within the architecture, the revelation of the workings through our use cases can also be considered relevant more generally for publish-subscribe architectures.

On inter-domain name resolution for information-centric networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a paradigm that aims to better reflect current Internet usage patterns by focusing on information, rather than on hosts. One of the most critical ICN functionalities is the efficient resolution/location of information objects i.e., name resolution. The vast size of the information object namespace calls for a highly scalable and efficient name resolution approach. Currently proposed solutions either rely on a DHT structure, thus ensuring load balancing and scalability at the cost of inefficient routing, or on hierarchical structures, thus preserving routing efficiency at the cost of limited scalability. In this paper, we study in detail the tradeoff between state/signaling overhead versus routing efficiency for a generic name-resolution system based on a novel DHT scheme with enhanced routing properties, and compare it to DONA, an ICN architecture based on hierarchical resolution and routing.

Access control enforcement delegation for information-centric networking architectures

Information is the building block of Information Centric Networks (ICNs). Access control policies limit information dissemination to authorized entities only. Defining access control policies in an ICN is a non-trivial task as an information item may exist in multiple copies dispersed in various network locations, including caches and content replication servers. In this paper we propose an access control enforcement delegation scheme which enables the purveyor of an information item to evaluate a request against an access control policy, without having access to the requestor credentials nor to the actual definition of the policy. Such an approach has multiple merits: it enables the interoperability of various stakeholders, it protects user identity and it can set the basis for a privacy preserving mechanism. An implementation of our scheme supports its feasibility.

IP over ICN - The better IP?

This paper presents a proposition for information centric networking (ICN) that lies outside the typical trajectory of aiming for a wholesale replacement of IP as the internetworking layer of the Internet. Instead, we propose that a careful exploitation of key ICN benefits, expanding previously funded ICN efforts, will enable individual operators to improve the performance of their IP-based services along many dimensions. Alongside the main motivation for our work, we present an early strawman architecture for such an IP-over-ICN proposition, which will ultimately be implemented and trialed in a recently started H2020 research effort.

Fighting spam in publish/subscribe networks using information ranking

New paradigms for the Future Internet are receiving an increased attention by the research community. The publish/subscribe paradigm is one of these and of particular interest, as it turns the Internet into an information-centric rather than endpoint-centric place of communication. While significant work has been undertaken to secure publish/subscribe systems, little attention has been given to prevent spam. In this paper we propose a light-weight solution for fighting spam, based on information items ranking. We compare our solution to a users-ranking based solution and we show that our solution is more effective in terms of publication spam isolation.

Publish–Subscribe Internetworking Security Aspects

Publish–Subscribe is a paradigm that is recently receiving increasing attention by the research community, mainly due to its information oriented nature. Although the publish–subscribe paradigm yields significant security advantages over the traditional send–receive one, various security and privacy challenges are raised when it comes to the design of an internetworking architecture that is solely based on this paradigm, such as the Publish Subscribe Internet \((\Uppsi)\) architecture. \(\Uppsi\) is the main outcome of the Publish–Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm (PSIRP) project, which was launched with the ambition to develop and evaluate a clean-slate architecture for the future Internet based on the publish–subscribe paradigm. Availability, security, privacy and mobility support are considered as core properties for this new form of internetworking, instead of being provided as add-ons, as in the current Internet. This paper discusses the security and privacy properties of and challenges for publish–subscribe internetworking architectures and specific techniques and solutions developed in PSIRP for \(\Uppsi.\)

Towards a secure rendezvous network for future publish/subscribe architectures

Publish/Subscribe is often regarded as a promising paradigm for Future Internet architectures. Its information oriented nature and its particular security features have stimulated current research efforts which aim at applying publish/subscribe principles to a clean-slate Internet architecture. One of the core components of publish/subscribe architectures is the rendezvous network. Any security failure that a rendezvous network may face will probably jeopardize the operation of the whole (inter-)network. In this paper we highlight security requirements and potential security issues of rendezvous networks and we present security solutions that can be applied in order to shield them.

Enhancing information lookup privacy through homomorphic encryption

Revealing one’s interests in communication has been recognized as a growing problem in the Internet. We postulate that it is desirable for future information retrieval systems to provide privacy in both what information is requested and what information is received, without raising obstacles to the deployment of accounting and access control mechanisms. This paper outlines a solution that fulfills this requirement in the context of broker-based systems, that is, systems in which brokers facilitate the communication between a consumer and a provider (of information). Broker-assisted communication is a common paradigm used in many settings, including contemporary information-centric networking approaches. We present the design and the evaluation of a solution that conceals consumers’ interests, without hiding consumer identity or location. The developed solution is applied over a system of hierarchically organized brokers; similar systems are used in many information lookup services. Because in these systems, information is distributed in various locations, traditional private information retrieval (PIR) protocols exhibit significant communication overhead. Our solution achieves up to 97% less communication overhead compared with a PIR protocol, without additional computational overhead. Copyright