A formally verified access control mechanism for information centric networks

Communications in Information-Centric Networking place more attention on WHAT data are being exchanged rather than WHO are exchanging them. A well-established approach of information centric networks is the Network of Information (NetInf) architecture, developed as part of the EU FP7 project SAIL. The security of NetInf has been fairly analysed in the literature. In particular, research efforts have been focusing on achieving data integrity and confidentially, source or publisher authenticity and authorization. This paper analyses some work in the literature to enforce authorized access to data in NetInf, highlights a potential security threat and proposes an enhancement to address the discovered threat. The new enhancement has been formally verified using formal method approach based on the Casper/FDR tool.