Copyright protection in named data networking

As a new Internet architecture, Named Data Networking (NDN) decouples location from the data itself to achieve security, scalability, and mobility. Although router-side data caching used in NDN reduces data acquisition delay, it introduces a new copyright protection challenge: how to prevent unauthorized users to retrieve data cached in routers that are out of the control of its publisher? Current approaches that rely on a common encryption key among authorized users cannot protect copyright well since if one authorized user secretly leaks the key, we cannot tell who has leaked the key out. In this paper, we present a split-based scheme to solve this copyright protection problem for large-sized data. The data is split into a large part that could be cached in routers for all users to retrieve, and a small part that is unique for each authorized user. This scheme exploits the fact that in the bit-wise OR operation, both bit 0 and bit 1 can OR with 1 to generate the same result of bit 1. The analysis of our scheme shows that it has a good performance in terms of copyright protection, data retrieval efficiency, and overhead.