PROTECTOR: Privacy-preserving information lookup in content-centric networks

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is an emerging paradigm that can anticipate growing demands of content delivery in coming years. The underlying architecture of the CCN enables users to search for content based on names. On one hand, this is a privacy-friendly feature that do not require source and destination addresses. On the other hand, semantically-rich names reveal sufficient information about users' preferences. Unfortunately, a curious CCN node may learn and sell sensitive information to third-parties, thus posing serious threats to users' privacy. In this paper, we present PROTECTOR that aims at protecting content names as well as content and allows a CCN network to add new users or remove existing ones without requiring any re-encryption of stored content and names. It is scalable and efficient as it incurs very limited overhead for required cryptographic operations. Our performance analysis reports that PROTECTOR can handle 34 and over 10 million requests per second at boundary and other CCN nodes, respectively.