OCP: A protocol for secure communication in federated content networks

•Discussion of security issues in Federated Content Distribution Networks (FCDNs).•Proposal of security protocol for signaling communications in FCDNs.•Security and performance analyses of the proposed protocol.

Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) are networks that make intense use of caching and multicast overlay techniques for transmitting video and other stream media, a type of traffic that has been growing tremendously in the last years. To cope with this increasing demand, several telecommunications companies have been associated to create federated CDNs (FCDNs), that involves many different providers and, hence, distinct domains. Although beneficial in terms of increased capillarity and scalability of service delivery, the interaction between FCDN elements from different providers brings many new challenges. Among them, one that has received little attention so far refers to security, an essential service for preventing the misuse of the FCDN resources. Aiming to tackle this issue, this paper presents the Overlay Communication Protocol (OCP), a security mechanism that allows the secure signaling communication in FCDNs. OCP takes into account all elements involved in the content delivery process, addressing Route Forgery attacks and concealing the network structure from potential attackers. Together with the protocol description and security analysis, we also present experimental results on its implementation, showing that it introduces little impact on the overall network performance.

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