[Ndn-interest] use cases of manifest objects in NDN

Ilya Moiseenko iliamo at UCLA.EDU
Mon Oct 6 13:21:24 PDT 2014


Hi all,
while working on some of the research projects / demos / apps, many people noticed that there is a potential or real benefit of using information objects that do not carry any content, but instead carry useful meta-information about some other Data packets. Right now, these “supportive” objects are usually called Manifests.

One particular use case of manifests is speeding up signing and verification of multiple Data packets. The speed-up comes from the fact that instead of signing each Data packet using public key crypto methods, the Data packets can be secured by much faster hash computation. The name of each Data packet along with a corresponding hash is placed in the Manifest packet, which is signed with public key crypto.  

This scheme makes packet verification faster, because only a manifest packet must be verified using public key crypto methods, and all other data packets listed in the manifest can be verified by recomputing the digest and comparing to the digest specified in the manifest.

One disadvantage of this scheme, is that in general case there is an additional round-trip delay, because manifest needs to be fetched first. (More info in the paper “Self verifying names for read-only named data“)

I’ve put online a technical report that describes a protocol eliminating round-trip delay for fetching multi-segment content with embedded manifests: http://named-data.net/publications/techreports/ndn-tr-25-manifest-embedding/

I expect that this approach can be useful for passing around multi-segment content (made dynamically) with roughly 5-10 times faster signing and verification execution over the traditional approach. 

If you have comments or counterarguments, let’s have a discussion in this thread.

Thanks
Ilya



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