To secure all communications, Named Data Networking (NDN) requires that each entity joining an NDN network go through a bootstrapping process first, to obtain its initial security credentials. Several solutions have been developed to bootstrap IoT devices in localized environments, where the devices being bootstrapped are within the physical reach of their bootstrapper. However, distributed applications need to bootstrap remote users and devices into an NDN-based system over insecure Internet connectivity. In this work, we take Hydra, a federated distributed file storage system made of servers contributed by multiple participating organizations, as a use case to drive the design and development of a remote bootstrapping solution, dubbed Cornerstone. We describe the design of Cornerstone, evaluate its effectiveness, and discuss the lessons learned from this process.

An NDN network is made of named entities with various trust relations between each other. Entities are organized into trust zones. Each trust zone contains the entities under the same administrative control. This work-in-progress explores an approach to establishing trust relations between trust zones.

Named-Data Networking (NDN) is a novel network that secures network communication by fetching semantically named and secured data. All data packets in NDN are signed by producers and verified by data consumers. Therefore, it is vital to have producers' certificates available all the time. In this paper, we describe the design of CLedger, a secure distributed certificate ledger, to ensure certificate availability in NDN. CLedger logs certificate records in an immutable Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure and replicates the DAG among a set of distributed loggers. We implemented CLedger using NDN's pub/sub API, and evaluated our design through an emulated deployment setting. Our initial evaluation results show that CLedger is effective, efficient, and resilient to failures.