PRIDN: A Privacy Preserving Data Sharing on Named Data Networking

The Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture is a futuristic internet infrastructure that aims to deliver content efficiently. However, NDN is faced with the challenge of ensuring the privacy of both content and names. Traditional solutions have focused on encrypting and signing content before injecting the resultant ciphertext into the NDN platform to provide confidentiality and integrity. However, these solutions fail to protect content name privacy in critical applications such as the military and healthcare. To address this challenge, we propose Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing on Named Data Networking (PRIDN), which employs a combination of proxy re-encryption and symmetric mechanisms to secure both content and names. PRIDN offers several advantages over existing solutions. Firstly, it eliminates the need for subscribers to communicate with content publishers for decryption keys, reducing communication overhead and ensuring that content publishers do not need to be online all the time to respond to key generation requests. Second, the proxy re-encryption mechanism prevents replication of ciphertexts, thus avoiding multiple instances of the same content in the network. Lastly, PRIDN also protects sensitive information in content names, preventing user profiling and censorship. Simulation results from ndnSIM and MIRACL libraries demonstrate that PRIDN reduces content retrieval time on NDN. A crypto-verification tool, Verifpal, shows that the proposed protocols are secure for real-world deployment.