Content-based Security using Blockchain Technology

Abstract

Abstract The concept of Information Centric Network (ICN) is a promising common approach to various Internet research projects. This technology involves in-network caching, multi-sided commu- nication via replication, and models of interaction that disassociate senders and receivers. The objective is to provide a better-suited network infrastructure service which can be more resilient to disruption and failure. The concept of ICN (Information Centric Network) has shifted the Internet architecture from user-centric to content-centric. In other words, the users of Inter- net are mainly caring about sharing information instead of focusing on information resources. Therefore, ICN represents existing and anticipated requirements better than the current Internet architecture whose networking size is expanding remarkably in terms of memory cost, power consumption, and processing complexity. However, despite the fact that ICN model is an up-and-coming solution that tackles many issues of the current Internet, ICN still faces many challenges that should be considered. One of these challenges is the possibility of tampering with the original data when the publisher registers its content in ICN nodes. To end this, with the development of blockchain technology that begins to play a vital role in the security field, most ICN’s problems can be solved using the powerful security aspects of this technology. By using the blockchain paradigm, all of the executed transactions are carried, and then committed to the global blockchain. Each blockchain ledger stores a copy of data, thus, any ix

ICN node cannot deny or refuse the transactions that have been committed by the blockchain. The blockchain can achieve a global agreement for the whole sequence of contents. Therefore, an incompatible record/transaction will be removed once it is confirmed. These non-repudiation and non-tampering characteristics of the blockchain guarantee a secure availability of contents in ICN. Moreover, the in-network content caching feature of ICN architecture can cope with the distributed behavior of blockchain security. In this thesis, we design a Secured Blockchain Based ICN (SBBICN) implementation that uti- lizes the secure properties of Blockchain technology, such as data integrity and non-tampering, to protect the ICN from the aforementioned dangers. In this suggested system, we discuss and create a voting system based on the blockchain consensus algorithm to avoid a single point of failure throughout the verification process, and we test the system’s efficacy using an Ethereum smart contract. The experimental findings and security analysis show how our proposed system can be efficient.