SCN4NDN: University of Memphis and our lab join forces in an NGI-Atlantic funded project

The Self-Certifying Names for Named Data Networking (SCN4NDN) project will perform extensive experiments to validate and evaluate the application of Decentalized Identifiers (DIDs) to the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm. ICN's goal is to enable fast and secure content dissemination by leveraging multicast, multipath, and caching, and by using novel trust mechanisms. One predominant ICN architecture is the Named Data Networking (NDN). NDN, and many other similar architectures, use digital signatures to protect content integrity and authenticity. A digital certificate is used for binding the signing key with the content name. In this project we replace this approach and we use DIDs instead. Using DIDs, content names become decentralized, owner-independent, and self-certifying, in the sense that a user can verify the authenticity and the integrity of a content item, by relying only on the content name and the content item itself, removing the need for trust anchors, or any other middlemen.
The experiments will be undertaken over the NDN testbed and other specialized experimental infrastructure. The project is a collaboration between the University of Memphis in the USA and our lab, and it is funded by NGIatlantic.eu. For more information visit the project's home page