The named data networking flow filter: Towards improved security over information leakage attacks

Named Data Networking (NDN) has the potential to create a more secure future Internet. It is therefore crucial to investigate its vulnerabilities in order to make it safer against information leakage attacks. In NDN, malware inside an enterprise can encode confidential information into Interest names and send it to the attacker. One of the countermeasures is to inspect a name in the Interest using a name filter and identify it as legitimate or anomalous. Although the name filter can dramatically decrease the information leakage throughput per Interest, it has a serious disadvantage: it does not consider a flow of Interests. This means that the malware can not only cause information leakage, but even improve the speed of the attack by aggressively producing massive flows of malicious Interests. This paper investigates such NDN flow attacks. Our contribution is twofold. First, we present a scheme that converts an HTTP flow into the corresponding NDN flow, as to date there is no publicly available dataset of the latter. Second, we propose an NDN flow filter based on support vector machines to classify the short-term activity of NDN consumers as legitimate or anomalous. In order to obtain legitimate and anomalous flows, we use a preprocessing anomaly detection step where we mark consumers based on their long-term activity. Our results clearly show that the flow filter improves the performance of the name filter by two orders of magnitude. Thus, we expect that our approach will drastically reduce the impact of this security attack in NDN.