Denial-of-service in content centric (named data) networking: a tutorial and state-of-the-art survey

Content centric networking (CCN) is a paradigm shift from current Internet protocol-address-based communication model to content-oriented model in computer networks. Like traditional networks, it is identified that CCN is also vulnerable to many security threats including denial-of-service (DoS). This fact has recently caught a considerable attention in research community while different proposals of defense are being published. In this paper, we provide a literature review on different types of possible DoS attacks in CCN and their proposed countermeasures. DoS attacks can be triggered in CCN to exhaust resources within a CCN router or the ultimate content source(s). Two characteristics of CCN, that is, state maintenance of forwarded requests in a router using pending interest table and the fact that a response (content) follows the same path in reverse direction through which the corresponding request (interest) travels have been taken as major advantages to fight against DoS attacks in CCN under different proposed approaches. This survey makes a contribution by (a) highlighting state-of-the-art work in a tutorial manner on the exploration of different DoS attacks and their countermeasures in CCN, (b) identifying some potential problems of current CCN features and existing proposals of defense, and (c) forecasting and providing an overview of a few possible future techniques to help researchers fight against CCN-DoS attacks. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.