The Impact of the Interest Flooding Attack on the Pending Interest Table of CCN routers
Diego Canizio Lopes, Andre Luiz Nasserala Pires, Igor M. Moraes · 2022
This paper evaluates the impact of the interest flooding attack on the Pending Interest Table (PIT) of content routers of the Content Centric Networking (CCN) architecture. In this attack, malicious consumers and malicious producers act in collusion. Malicious consumers send interest packets at a high rate to retrieve content from malicious producers who purposely have a reduced responsiveness to these interests in order to overload the PIT of content routers. In this case, PIT entries created by interest packets sent by malicious consumers will stay at PIT until the timeout expires. Thus, if PIT reaches its maximum number of entries, content routers will reject new interest packets, including interests sent by legitimate consumers. We evaluate the impact of the attack through simulation. The evaluation metrics are the rate of interest packets retrieved, the content retrieval delay, and the occupancy rate of the PIT of content routers. The results show that the attack is effective and compromises the router's PIT, which reaches an occupancy rate of up to 95.83% during the attack, in the analyzed scenarios. In this case, the rate of interest packets retrieved is less than 30% and the content retrieval delay increases by more than 16 times compared with the content retrieval time with no attack.