The fast-growing Internet traffic is increasingly becoming content-based and driven by mobile users, with users more interested in data rather than its source. This has precipitated the need for an information-centric Internet architecture. Research in information-centric networks (ICNs) have resulted in novel architectures, e.g., CCN/NDN, DONA, and PSIRP/PURSUIT; all agree on named data based addressing and pervasive caching as integral design components. With network-wide content caching, enforcement of content access control policies become non-trivial. Each caching node in the network needs to enforce access control policies with the help of the content provider. This becomes inefficient and prone to unbounded latencies especially during provider outages. In this paper, we propose an efficient access control framework for ICN, which allows legitimate users to access and use the cached content directly, and does not require verification/authentication by an online provider authentication server or the content serving router. This framework would help reduce the impact of system down-time from server outages and reduce delivery latency by leveraging caching while guaranteeing access only to legitimate users. Experimental/simulation results demonstrate the suitability of this scheme for all users, but particularly for mobile users, especially in terms of the security and latency overheads.
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