Information-Centric Networking in Wireless Environments: Security Risks and Challenges

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has emerged as a paradigm to cope with the lack of built-in security primitives and efficient mechanisms for content distribution of today's Internet. However, deploying ICN in a wireless environment poses a different set of challenges compared to a wired environment, especially when it comes to security. In this article, we present the security issues that may arise and the attacks that may occur from different points of view when ICN is deployed in wireless environments. The discussed attacks may target both applications and the ICN network itself by exploiting elements of the ICN architecture, such as content names and in-network content caches. Furthermore, we discuss potential solutions to the presented issues and countermeasures to the presented attacks. Finally, we identify future research opportunities and directions.