Catch me if you can: A practical framework to evade censorship in information-centric networks

Reza Tourani, Satyajayant Misra, Joerg Kliewer, Scott Ortegel, Travis Mick

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

24 Scopus citations

Abstract

Internet traffic is increasingly becoming multimedia-centric. Its growth is driven by the fast-growing mobile user base that is more interested in the content rather than its origin. These trends have motivated proposals for a new Internet networking paradigm-information-centric networking (ICN). This paradigm requires unique names for packets to leverage pervasive in-network caching, name-based routing, and named-data provenance. However named-data routing makes user censorship easy. Hence an anti-censorship mechanism is imperative to help users mask their named queries to prevent censorship and identification. However, this masking mechanism should not adversely affect request rates. In this paper, we propose such an anti-censorship framework, which is lightweight and specifically targets low compute power mobile devices. We analyze our framework's information-theoretic secrecy and present perfect secrecy thresholds under different scenarios. We also analyze its breakabil-ity and computational security. Experimental results prove the framework's effectiveness: for requests it adds between 1.3-1.8 times in latency overhead over baseline ICN; significantly lesser than the overhead of the state of the art Tor (up to 38 times over TCP).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationICN 2015 - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Information-Centric Networking
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages167-176
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450338554
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 30 2015
Event2nd International Conference on Information-Centric Networking, ICN 2015 - San Francisco, United States
Duration: Sep 30 2015Oct 2 2015

Publication series

NameICN 2015 - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Information-Centric Networking

Other

Other2nd International Conference on Information-Centric Networking, ICN 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Francisco
Period9/30/1510/2/15

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems

Keywords

  • Information theory
  • Information-centric networking
  • NDN
  • Privacy
  • Security

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