Robust attribute-based access control protocol over data-centric IoT–NDN networking

Named Data Networking (NDN) is an emerging content-centric communication paradigm envisioned for future IoT architectures. Its features, including in-network caching, multicast forwarding, and data-centric security, make it a promising network protocol for resource-constrained devices. However, the data-centric nature of NDN introduces confidentiality concerns, as the decoupling of data from its source and distributed caching prevent the producer from directly controlling access to the data after injecting it in the network. However, the current literature still does not accommodate NDN’s communication model in heterogeneous IoT environments. Moreover, existing solutions often lack support for fine-grained, cross-domain access control and efficient revocation mechanisms.To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel decentralized, fine-grained access control protocol for IoT–NDN networks. Our protocol leverages multi-authority ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption to ensure robust cryptographic access control to data, and is adapted to support data streaming scenarios. Additionally, it provides an efficient revocation mechanism that enables immediate attribute revocation without requiring re-keying. This mechanism is coupled with an optimization strategy to reduce the cost of cryptographic operations during revocation in streaming contexts. Our protocol also integrates a symmetric key exchange and derivation mechanism that ensures fast data access. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our scheme through NS-3 simulations using ndnSIM, complemented by a computational analysis of the cryptographic algorithms on IoT devices. The results demonstrate that our protocol achieves low overhead in both latency and energy consumption.