Producer Anonymity Based on Onion Routing in Named Data Networking

Abstract

Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of promising next generation Internet architectures that aim to realize efficient content distribution. However, in terms of producer anonymity, NDN has a serious problem that adversaries can easily learn who publishes what content due to its feature that content is inherently tied to the producer by the content name and the signature. In this article, we first define producer anonymity rigorously in terms of content-producer unlinkability, and then design a system to achieve it. Our design is based on hidden service, which is an onion routing-based system in IP, however, we improve it to take full advantage of NDN. We demonstrate that our system provides a level of anonymity comparable to hidden service with lower overhead through analysis and experiment.