  The fast-growing Internet traffic is increasingly becoming content-based and
driven by mobile users, with users more interested in data rather than its
source. This has precipitated the need for an information-centric Internet
architecture. Research in information-centric networks (ICNs) have resulted in
novel architectures, e.g., CCN/NDN, DONA, and PSIRP/PURSUIT; all agree on named
data based addressing and pervasive caching as integral design components. With
network-wide content caching, enforcement of content access control policies
become non-trivial. Each caching node in the network needs to enforce access
control policies with the help of the content provider. This becomes
inefficient and prone to unbounded latencies especially during provider
outages.
  In this paper, we propose an efficient access control framework for ICN,
which allows legitimate users to access and use the cached content directly,
and does not require verification/authentication by an online provider
authentication server or the content serving router. This framework would help
reduce the impact of system down-time from server outages and reduce delivery
latency by leveraging caching while guaranteeing access only to legitimate
users. Experimental/simulation results demonstrate the suitability of this
scheme for all users, but particularly for mobile users, especially in terms of
the security and latency overheads.
