Research projects

Securing Content Delivery and Provenance

Funding:

NGIatlantic.eu

Homepage:

https://mm.aueb.gr/projects/second

In the project SCN4NDN, we proposed the use of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) to create self-certifying content names in Named Data Networking (NDN). While legacy DID systems assume a registry for DID documents, our approach offered decentralized and autonomous DID document management by integrating DID documents into the content items themselves. The outcome of SCN4NDN was the concept of Self-Verifiable Content (SVC), i.e., content whose authenticity can be verified without relying on third parties.
While SCN4NDN focused on the use of SVC at the application level, SECOND project explores the full potential of SVC in NDN and extend it by a) improving the security and reliability of critical components for content delivery, such as caches and forwarders, b) simplifying security key management, by leveraging the information-centric API of NDN, c) improving SVC usability and content provenance, by supporting human-readable names through Certificateless Public Key Cryptography (Certificateless PKC), and d) enhancing privacy by allowing the retrieval of verifiable subsets of SVC using BBS+ digital signatures, which support Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP).