An efficient and secure information retrieval framework for content centric networks

Content centric networking is a new networking architecture designed to work with existing network architecture and protocols. In content centric networks emphasis is on data rather than its location. Content centric networks, support data caching in intermediate nodes that allows them to serve future request. This results in more efficient content delivery. As data is cached at various intermediate nodes, the owner of the data has no control over the data. Data stored in intermediate nodes can be vulnerable and be exploited by the intermediate nodes, malicious users and intruders, who do not have legitimate access to these data. In addition to this entire data is being broadcasted by the intermediate nodes whenever they receive a request for that corresponding data. This utilizes a substantial portion of the network bandwidth. To address these issues we propose a framework in this paper that (1) efficiently organizes data that is cached in intermediate nodes using a NOSQL (Not Only SQL) graph database, (2) reduces the network utilization, (3) secures all the data transferred across content centric networks, such that only owners of the data can provide access to the consumers of their data and (4) provides role-based access to the consumers, and reduces complications in key distribution and management. Our experimental results indicate that our framework is able to reduce network utilization by over 79% in the best-case scenario and by over 65% in the worst-case scenario.