Study of Censorship in Named Data Networking

Named Data Networking (NDN) (Zhang et al. in Named data networking (ndn) project. Relatorio Tecnico NDN-0001, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center-PARC, 2010) focuses on content rather than hosts as in today's IP-based network. While NDN aims to incorporate security into its design, some security issues such as censorship in NDN has not been studied. This paper aims to investigate the robustness of file transmission in NDN in the face of censorship. We mainly focus on two types of censorship techniques: name-watchlist attack and deep packet inspection (DPI). We show by simulation that file transmission in NDN is robuster than that in IP-based network since NDN allows multiple outgoing faces when forwarding an Interest packet. Despite of this, we show that censorship in NDN still affects users to get their requested data and therefore anti-censorship is necessary. We further propose an anti-censorship system against these two censorship techniques. We give the system design along with the security analysis and performance evaluation.