An authenticated re‐encryption scheme for secure file transfer in named data networks

Summary With the fast progress of the Internet and communication technologies, the digital communication is increasingly based on the architecture of TCP/IP. Nevertheless, in TCP/IP's architecture, there are limitations such as data uncertainty and flow overloading. In response to this, a novel architecture has been proposed, which is known as the named data network (NDN). Named data network is an alternative network architecture based on the data each user accesses. Users gain accesses to the data by using an adjacent router (node) that verifies the correctness of the data. In NDN, the router has the capability to store and search for the data. Hence, this architecture largely improves the disadvantages in TCP/IP's architecture. Named data network is a new proposal and relatively under‐researched now. Thus far, an adequate secure file transfer protocol is still unavailable for NDN. In some cases, files are broken or the source fails to authenticate, which results in the need to discover the owner of the file. Furthermore, we believe that NDN should involve an authentication mechanism in the secure file transfer protocol. In view of the above, this paper presents an authenticated re‐encryption scheme for NDN, which offers sender authentication, data confidentiality, and support for potential receivers. Finally, we also propose a security model for sender authentication and prove that the proposed scheme is secure. A file transfer protocol tailored for Named Data Networks (NDN) is presented in this paper. Compared with previous works, the proposed protocol achieves not only the requirements for NDN but also the sender authentication. It has also been demonstrated as being secure by formal proofs.