Analyzing the producer-consumer collusion attack in Content-Centric Networks

This paper evaluates a denial-of-service attack in Content Centric Networks (CCN) that aims at increasing the content retrieval time. In this attack, malicious consumers and producers collude by generating content and changing content popularity. Malicious contents are stored by nodes and occupy the cache space that should be occupied by legitimate contents. Thus, the probability of legitimate consumers retrieves contents directly from the producer increases as well as the content retrieval time. We evaluate the impact of the attack by varying the number of consumers in collusion, the interest packets rate, and the way contents are requested. Results show if 20% of consumers are malicious and send 500 interests/s each, the content retrieval time experienced by legitimate users increases by 20 times.