Cache nFace: a simple countermeasure for the producer-consumer collusion attack in Named Data Networking

We propose, in this paper, a countermeasure against the producer-consumer collusion attack in Named Data Networking (NDN). In this attack, malicious nodes act in collusion by generating content requests at high rate and thus changing content popularity. The goal of the attack is to reduce in-network caching efficiency by increasing the probability of legitimate consumers to retrieve contents directly from the producer. The proposed countermeasure, called Cache nFace, mitigates this attack by dividing the cache of a node into sub-caches. Each sub-cache only stores contents requested through one specific network interface. Our assumption is that malicious requests do not arrive simultaneously at all interfaces of a content router very often. Results show that cache nFace reduces up to 50% the effectiveness of the attack and outperforms another proposal found in the literature in all the analyzed scenarios.