Trust-Weighted Proactive Caching (TWPC): A Unified Security-Caching Protocol for Named Data Networking

Abstract

In-network caching allows Named Data Networking (NDN) to inherently lower latency and bandwidth consumption, but it also creates prime vectors for security vulnerabilities like Cache Pollution Attacks (CPA) and Side-Channel Timing Attacks (SCTA). Conventional defenses typically treat security and content routing as isolated issues, applying filters reactively only after the cache has already been compromised. This paper introduces Trust-Weighted Proactive Caching (TWPC), a protocol designed to stop malicious content from ever reaching the Content Store by embedding dynamic trust evaluation directly into the packet forwarding pipeline. For every incoming request, TWPC aggregates content demand, name-prefix history, and immediate requester anomalies to generate a single Trust Score. Suspicious Interests are preemptively dropped or explicitly flagged so as to bypass storage. Rather than relying on static thresholds, an on-line reinforcement learning loop dynamically recalibrates policy parameters to match shifting attack patterns. We evaluated our protocol across multiple topologies (including GEANT and Abilene) using ndnSIM. Under active CPA and SCTA stress, TWPC consistently maintained a 22.6% higher cache hit ratio and saved 19% in overall latency compared to standard baselines, achieving a 97.4% detection accuracy.