Interest Flooding Attack

An Interest Flooding Attack (IFA) is a denial-of-service attack in an Information-centric network (or Content-Centric Networking (CCN) or Named Data Networking (NDN)). An attacker requests existing or non-existing content in order to overload the distribution infrastructure.{{cite journal|last1=Wählisch|first1=Matthias|last2=Schmidt|first2=Thomas C.|last3=Vahlenkamp|first3=Markus|title=Backscatter from the Data Plane -- Threats to Stability and Security in Information-Centric Network Infrastructure|journal=Computer Networks|volume=57|issue=16|pages=3192–3206|doi=10.1016/j.comnet.2013.07.009|date=2013|url=http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/waehl/papers/interest-flooding-wsv-bdpts-13.pdf|location=Original version arXiv:1205.4778v1, May 2012|arxiv=1205.4778|s2cid=5767511}} This can be implemented by sending Interest packets, which are not resolved at all or not resolved fast enough, and thus lead to malicious CPU or memory consumption.{{Cite web |title=Volatile Memory - an overview {{!}} ScienceDirect Topics |url=https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/volatile-memory |access-date=2023-12-11 |website=www.sciencedirect.com}}

This attack was previously denoted an open problem in ICN, only heuristic countermeasures available.{{vague|date=June 2015}}{{cite conference|last1=Afanasyev|first1=Alexander|last2=Mahadevan|first2=Priya|last3=Moiseenko|first3=Ilya|last4=Uzun|first4=Ersin|last5=Zhang|first5=Lixia|title=Interest Flooding Attack and Countermeasures in Named Data Networking|book-title=Proceedings of IFIP Networking|date=2013|url=http://lasr.cs.ucla.edu/afanasyev/data/files/Afanasyev/ifip-interest-flooding-ndn.pdf}} In 2016, Aubrey Alston and Tamer Refaei of The MITRE Corporation presented an exact solution to this problem which utilizes an in-packet cryptographic mechanism to remove the ability of high-volume Interest traffic to overload the distribution infrastructure of the network.{{cite conference |title=Neutralizing Interest Flooding Attacks in Named Data Networks using Cryptographic Route Tokens|last1=Alston|first1=Aubrey|last2=Refaei|first2=Tamer|date=2016|publisher=IEEE|book-title=Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE 15th International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA)|pages=85–88|location=Cambridge, MA|conference=IEEE 15th International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA)|doi=10.1109/NCA.2016.7778598}}