Designing Privacy-Preserving Protocols for Content Sharing and Aggregation in Content Centric Networking

In the content-centric networking (CCN), the content transmitted between data owners, consumers, and the servers is confidential to its publishers. Therefore, the content's publishers are sensitive to publication of their content to unauthorized consumers and third party service providers. Access control-based mechanisms have been efficient solutions to address this challenge where the content can be accessed by legitimate consumers only. However, the main limitation with an access control-based solution is that the content itself and the user interests are made public to certain parties in the system. Moreover, the solutions based on access control mechanism are limited within only sharing the content among various publishers and consumers where on the contrary, the secure aggregation of content in CCN is yet to be explored. To address these issues, we describe possible cryptographic solutions for content privacy in CCN, which can share and aggregate the content securely. More specifically, we propose two cryptographic protocols for content sharing and aggregation: 1) cryptographic protocol to exchange the encrypted content (CPE2C) and 2) privacy-preserving aggregation over distributed content (PDAC). The CPE2C protocol is simple yet highly secure against intruders or collusion attacks. This protocol is useful in terms of exchanging sensitive content between a publisher and a consumer. The PDAC is effective for distributed, secure, and energy-efficient content aggregation in smart IoT systems leveraging the CCN architecture and cloud services. The privacy analysis and performance results show that the proposed cryptographic protocols perform efficiently without disclosing any private information.