Security Design for an Inter-Domain Publish/Subscribe Architecture

Several new architectures have been recently proposed to replace the Internet Protocol Suite with a data-centric or publish/subscribe (pub/sub) network layer waist for the Internet. The clean-slate design makes it possible to take into account issues in the current Internet, such as unwanted traffic, from the start. If these new proposals are ever deployed as part of the public Internet as an essential building block of the infrastructure, they must be able to operate in a hostile environment, where a large number of users are assumed to collude against the network and other users. In this paper we present a security design through the network stack for a data-centric pub/sub architecture that achieves availability, information integrity, and allows application-specific security policies while remaining scalable. We analyse the solution and examine the minimal trust assumptions between the stakeholders in the system to guarantee the security properties advertised.