The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Sec-
tion 2 gives an overview of the NetInf architecture and
the proposed Registration Stage in (M. Aiash, 2014).
Section 3 formally verifies the proposed access con-
trol in (M. Aiash, 2014), describes the discovered at-
tack and proposes an extension to address the discov-
ered attack. The paper is concluded in Section 4.
2 RELATED WORK
2.1 An Overview of the NetInf
In NetInf architecture, publishers advertise data ob-
jects in the NetInf system and serve them to sub-
scribers upon requests. The NetInf system acts as a
middleman between publishers and subscribers, and
is involved in configuring the forwarding path for data
delivery (Edwall, 2013). Three pairs of messages
have been defined as part of the NetInf architecture:
• The GET-REQ/GET-RESP messages: The GET
message is used by a requester to request an NDO
from the NetInf network. A node responding to
the GET message would send a GET-RESP that
is linked to the GET request using the message-Id
(msg-id) from the GET message.
• The PUBLISH-REQ/PUBLISH-RESP messages:
The PUBLISH message allows a publisher to
push the name and a copy of the NDO to the
network. A node receiving a PUBLISH mes-
sage may choose to cache the NDO according
to local policy and availability of resources and
returns PUBLISH-RESP message, otherwise, it
may choose to forward the message to other nodes
without sending the response message.
• The SEARCH/SEARCH-RESP messages: The
SEARCH message allows the requester to send a
set of query tokens containing search keywords.
The node that receives the SEARCH message,
will either respond if the NDO is in its own cache
or forward the SEARCH message.
These messages are supposed to be transported over
a Convergence Layer (CL) protocol. As stated
in (D. Kutscher, 2013), no CL protocol has been de-
fined yet, but any protocol that allows NetInf mes-
sages to be passed without loss of information can be
used as a NetInf Convergence Layer (NetInf-CL) pro-
tocol. These three pairs of messages define the trans-
actions of the Publication and Data Retrieval Stages
as follows:
1. The Publish Stage: Publishers publish their
NDOs to the NetInf system by sending the
PUBLISH-REQ message to the first hop node
which might choose to cache the included in-
formation and responds with a PUBLISH-RESP
message. Otherwise, it passes the PUBLISH-
REQ to the next hop route. A node that caches
NDO might update the NRS with the location of
the NDO.
2. The Data Retrieval Stage: As shown in Fig 1,
the NetInf combines two modes for data retrieval:
(a) The Name Resolution: In this mode, the pub-
lisher publishes an NDO using PUBLISH mes-
sage with a Name Resolution Service (NRS).
In this case, a requester will approach the NRS
first (using the GET message) which will direct
him to the information publisher.
(b) The Name-Based Routing: In this mode, the
GET message will be forwarded hop-by-hop
between NetInf nodes until a cached copy of
the requested NDO is found or the original pub-
lisher is reached.
2.2 Verifying Security Protocols using
Casper/FDR
Previously, analysing security protocols used to go
through two stages. Firstly, modelling the proto-
col using a theoretical notation or language such as
the CSP (G. Lowe, 2009). Secondly, verifying the
protocol using a model checker such as Failures-
Divergence Refinement (FDR) (FDR, 1993). How-
ever, describing a system or a protocol using CSP
is a quite difficult and error-prone task; therefore,
Gavin Lowe has developed the CASPER/FDR tool
to model security protocols, it accepts a simple and
human-friendly input file that describes the system
and compiles it into CSP code which is then checked
using the FDR model checker. Casper/FDR has been
used to model communication and security proto-
cols as in (B. Donovan, 1999), (Aiash, 2014). The
CASPER’s input file that describes the systems con-
sists of eight headers as explained in Table 1.
2.3 The NetInf Registration Stage
In NetInf, data sources publish NDOs by registering
a name/locator binding with the NRS using the Pub-
lish message or announcing routing information in a
routing protocol. Subscribers will approach the NRS
requesting a specific NDO, and the NRS will first re-
solve the NDO into a set of available locators and then
retrieve the copy of the data from the best available
source.
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