[Ndn-interest] Regarding NDN packet security

[Lixia Zhang]

"CertRevoke: A Certificate Revocation Framework for Named Data NetworkingShashank, thanks for exploring NDN! From your questions, I guess you may be looking into NDN's name-based access control (NAC) solutions?

Your first question: the concern seems that, given the data decryption key is encrypted in an object X using a legit's user Y's public key, an attacker Z could easily fetch the decryption key. As Kundan explained, Z can get a copy of X, but wont be able to read the decryption key in it, because Z doesn't have Y's private key.

Your 2nd question: a good question, yes it is possible to compromise a producer and its key needs to be revoked. NDN based systems try to minimize the danger and damage of key/cert compromises by shortening their life times, though compromises detection is still needed.
for revocation, there's initial work on NDN cert revocation: "CertRevoke: A Certificate Revocation Framework for Named Data Networking", https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3517212.3558079, which utilizes distributed ledgers. The paper referenced DLedger from several years ago, a more recent work is
"CLedger: A Secure Distributed Certificate Ledger via Named Data"
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10279244
again this is very initial work, we are extending it in another ongoing project to cover more general cases.

Lixia

> On Dec 24, 2023, at 11:02 PM, Shashank G via Ndn-interest <ndn-interest at lists.cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I am Shashank, a sophomore at National Institute of Technology, Karnataka from India. I recently began exploring NDN and have been fascinated by its data security aspect. However, since I am new to the field, I have quite a few doubts regarding the same, and I was hoping for your patience and guidance to clarify them.
> 
> 1) I was trying to understand how cryptographically signing packets works, and have got a certain grasp of it's advantages, however, I had a doubt - If the public keys themselves are named, then with the right naming convention, couldn't an attacker get access to data that he is not supposed to view. How is this prevented?
> 
> 2) Is there any mechanism to detect if the producer of data has been compromised, i.e, his private key has been obtained by a third party? If so, since the certificates are cached, how do we detect if the producer is safe or not?
> 
> I look forward to learning a lot here and eagerly await your response. Thank you.
> 
> Yours sincerely,
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