Interest flooding attack mitigation in a vehicular named data network

Vehicular named data network (VNDN) is the next-generation network architecture for intelligent transportation system. Contrary to the conventional transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) communication model, VNDN follows a data-centric approach where the user is interested in ‘WHAT’ instead of ‘WHERE’. Interest flooding attack (IFA) is one of the prominent security concerns in VNDNs. In IFA, attackers request for non-existent content to exhaust network resources and cause Interest packet flooding across the network. A novel attack mitigation scheme to counter IFA in VNDN has been proposed in this study. The proposed priority-based per-flow Interest rate monitoring (PP-FIRM) scheme determines the suspicious flow of malicious incoming Interest packets in attacked vehicles. A priority flag is assigned to the incoming flow of Interest packets that detects the occurrence of an attack. The priority of incoming Interest packet flow is calculated using a collaborative or neighbour-assisted approach. A comparison with another attack mitigation scheme validates that the proposed scheme performs better in terms of an improved cache hit ratio and Interest satisfaction ratio during the attack window. Besides this, pending Interest table utilisation, packet collisions rate, Interest packets retransmission count, end-to-end delay, and the ratio of timed out Interest packets have also been reduced. Furthermore, the scalability of the proposed research strategy is also evaluated by changing the density of attackers in real time. Moreover, in the proposed attack mitigation model, the rate of incoming legitimate Interest packets increases by reducing the drop rate of valid Interest packets.