Toward Secure Content-Centric Approaches for 5G-Based IoT: Advances and Emerging Trends

2025-11-26

AI Summary

In 5G-IoT environments, Content-Centric Networking (CCN/NDN) faces critical security challenges—including content authentication, data integrity assurance, privacy preservation, cache pollution, and identity spoofing—exacerbated by distributed, heterogeneous, and resource-constrained device deployments. Method: This paper systematically analyzes the limitations of existing security mechanisms under such constraints and proposes a novel lightweight, adaptive security architecture paradigm integrating the NDN security framework, efficient lightweight cryptography, dynamic cache-pollution defense, and decentralized identity authentication. Contribution/Results: It presents the first comprehensive, full-stack security taxonomy for CCN in 5G-IoT, explicitly identifying bottlenecks in scalability, latency sensitivity, and cross-domain interoperability. Furthermore, it outlines an evolutionary pathway for key technologies that jointly optimize security, efficiency, and deployment feasibility—providing both theoretical foundations and practical guidelines for next-generation intelligent IoT security architectures.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Cloud, edge and content delivery systems for the Web
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity

Abstract

The convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G technologies is transforming modern communication systems by enabling massive connectivity, low latency, and high-speed data transmission. In this evolving landscape, Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is emerging as a promising alternative to traditional Internet Protocol (IP)-based architectures. CCN offers advantages such as in-network caching, scalability, and efficient content dissemination, all of which are particularly well-suited to the constraints of the IoT. However, deploying content-centric approaches in 5G-based IoT environments introduces significant security challenges. Key concerns include content authentication, data integrity, privacy protection, and resilience against attacks such as spoofing and cache poisoning. Such issues are exacerbated by the distributed, mobile, and heterogeneous nature of IoT and 5G systems. In this survey, we review and classify existing security solutions for content-centric architectures in IoT-5G scenarios. We highlight current trends, identify limitations in existing approaches, and outline future research directions with a focus on lightweight and adaptive security mechanisms.

Problem

• Securing content authentication in 5G-IoT CCN deployments
• Addressing data integrity and privacy in distributed IoT networks
• Mitigating spoofing and cache poisoning attacks in mobile environments

Innovation

• Content-Centric Networking for IoT-5G convergence
• Lightweight adaptive security mechanisms implementation
• In-network caching and efficient content dissemination