Secure NDN Packet Encapsulation

Packet encapsulation is a general network technique that provides an essential building block for constructing secure networks. While extensively used in IP networks over the last few decades, secure packet encapsulation remains largely unexplored in the context of Named Data Networking (NDN) networks. NDN represents a radical departure from traditional endpoint-oriented networking by making secured data the centerpiece of communication. This new data-centric design brings both advantages and new challenges for the development of secure packet encapsulation that can preserve essential properties of an NDN network, including in-network data caching and built-in multicast data delivery. In this paper, we first identify the major differences between encapsulation solution designs in IP and NDN, highlighting the ensuing challenges, both inherent and practical. We then present a novel design to achieve secure NDN data packet encapsulation, and showcase an implementation suite that enables efficient fetching of securely encapsulated data.(1)