Curriculum
Computer Science and Innovation for Societal Challenges, XXXI series
Grant sponsor
UNIPD
Supervisor

Mauro Conti
Co-supervisor
Anna Spagnolli

Project:
 Securing Information Centric Networking.
Full text of the dissertation book can be downloaded from:  http://paduaresearch.cab.unipd.it/12054/

Abstract: In recent years, the usage model of the current Internet has experienced an unexpected paradigm shift due to overwhelming requirements in distributed content distribution, device mobility, network scalability, information retrieval, network-based services to name a few. To address these pressing requirements, along with inherent security (which was completely ignored by the early adopters of the Internet), researchers have proposed the Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm as a possible replacement of the current host-centric communication model.
In ICN, named content turns out to be a ``first-class entity", thus focusing on efficient content distribution, which is debatably not well served by the current Internet. Several projects have embraced the ICN philosophy and aim at proposing a viable future Internet architecture. However, to successfully accomplish the objective, ICN and its implementing projects should include a leading obligation in their design, i.e., support security from the outset. To evade the prolonged and endured past of incremental security-patching and retrofitting that characterizes the current Internet architecture.
This dissertation goes into such direction and focuses on securing ICN paradigm and its implementing architectures. In particular, this dissertation contributes by: (i) addressing vulnerabilities in the interaction of ICN's implicit features and widely used existing technology, such as multimedia streaming; (ii) exploiting ICN intrinsic mobility support to provide security services to the upper layer, such as authentication; (iii) securing the ICN mobility features; (iv) addressing the architectural security issues that are intrinsic to the ICN design; and (v) addressing the feasibility and effectiveness of ICN with respect to real-world deployment configurations.