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A scalable approach for managing access control in Information Centric Networks

One of the main challenges in Information Centric Networks (ICN) is providing access control to content publication and retrieval. Most of the existing approaches often consider a single user acting as publisher within a group. When dealing with multiple publishers, they may lead to a combinatorial explosion of cryptographic keys. Approaches that focus on multiple publishers, on the other hand, rely on specific network architectures and/or changes to operate. In this paper we propose a novel solution, supported by attribute-based encryption, for managing content access control. In our solution, we introduce secure content distribution groups, in which any member user can publish to and retrieve from. Unlike previous work, our solution keeps the number of cryptographic keys proportional to the number of group members, and may even be adopted gradually in any ICN architecture. The proposed solution is evaluated with respect to the overhead it imposes, number of required keys, and efficiency of content dissemination. In contrast to existing approaches, it offers higher access control flexibility, while reducing key management process complexity (in some scenarios, resulting in 97% less keys and objects in the network).