The Producer-Consumer Collusion Attack in Content-Centric Networks

Abstract

This paper evaluates a denial-of-service attack in
information-centric networks based on the Content Centric
Networking (CCN) architecture. This attack aims at increasing the
content retrieval time. In this attack, both malicious consumers
and producers collude, by generating, publishing, and changing
content popularity. Malicious contents are stored by intermediate
nodes and occupy the cache space that should be occupied by
legitimate content. Thus, the probability of a legitimate consumer
retrieves content directly from the producer increases as well as
the content retrieval time. We evaluate the impact of the attack by
varying the number of consumers and producers in collusion, the
interest packets rate, and the way malicious contents are
requested. Results show if 20% of consumers are malicious and
send 500 interests/s each, the content retrieval time experienced by
legitimate users increases by 20 times, which shows the
effectiveness of the attack.