[Ndn-interest] Securing Data packet.

David R. Oran daveoran at orandom.net
Wed Jul 3 09:11:20 PDT 2019


On 3 Jul 2019, at 10:45, Andriana Ioannou wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> In my current research I have altered the Data packets to include some
> information that will allow the routers on delivery paths to make 
> better
> caching decisions. This information may be updated during delivery 
> from the
> routers downstream.
>
It would be useful if you could elaborate a bit on what you’re trying 
to accomplish and what information might be added to the packet (outside 
the signatures’s security envelope since you say you want this to be 
modified hop-by-hop).

> I have been looking on the security implications for this, and so far 
> I
> understand that the community is mostly focused on the content 
> contained in
> a Data packet, and the related fields, e.g. name and key locator, 
> rather
> than securing the whole Data packet.
Well, since forwarding is stateful in NDN, you likely need to not only 
keep mutable fields in the clear so the routers can see them, eschew 
end-to-end integrity so you can modify them. It would be helpful if you 
could articulate what threats you hope to address by “securing” the 
entire data packet. Misbehavior by on-path routers? (note that packets 
can be protected on links via hop-by-hop encryption, so any 
vulnerabilities are ones introduced by on-path routers).

> My guess is that this would be an
> important overhead/cost since each router involved in the process will 
> have
> to decrypt each incoming Data packet to ensure its valid.
>
Well, you can ensure against modification with just integrity (e.g. with 
SHA) so there must be some confidentiality threat you want to foil by 
encryption.

> The only option I could think of would be to "enforce" the publisher 
> to
> sign those fields of the Data packet, too. Yet, this would mean that 
> the
> signature would not refer only to the content requested by the 
> consumer,
> which I guess is fundamentally wrong since you end up delivering 
> "garbage"
> to your consumers...
>
I’m not sure I follow this. There’s a fundamental disconnect between 
end-to-end integrity via signatures and the ability to modify packets as 
they traverse the network.

> I would appreciate if you could argue on this, since my security 
> background
> is a bit limited. I would be happy to be pointed out on some related
> literature too - if available.
>
It’s hard to know what to point you to without knowing in more detail 
what you’re trying to accomplish.

> Kind regards,
> Andriana.
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DaveO


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