A CA-based scheme of user authentication over Content-Centric Networking

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a predominant substitute of the current TCP/IP networking and it is proposed to be the next generation Internet foundation. The evident characteristic of this network architecture is caching and indexing contents by the inner nodes - the routers, so as to reduce the redundant transmission and thereby shorten the distance between user and content. In this paper, we propose and implement a user authentication scheme over CCN. We adopt the trust model based on certificate authority (CA) to provide the service of binding certificate with user´s identity, and help user determine the authenticity and reliability of the publisher of the network content. Also the specialized CA we designed for CCN takes advantage of the decentralization characteristic and cache mechanism of CCN to distribute the certificates and certificate revocation list (CRL) into the network, and it reduces the load of the CA central server when retrieving and verifying certificates. Besides, we propose a timeline-based method to segment the CRL with certificate issue date, thereby making the retrieval of CRL more effective.