Interest Flooding Attack

An Interest Flooding Attack (IFA) is a denial-of-service attack in an Information-centric network (or Content-Centric Networking (CCN) or Named Data Networking (NDN)). An attacker requests existing or non-existing content in order to overload the distribution infrastructure.^[1] This can be implemented by sending Interest packets, which are not resolved at all or not resolved fast enough, and thus lead to malicious CPU or memory consumption.^[2]

This attack was previously denoted an open problem in ICN, only heuristic countermeasures available.^[vague][3] In 2016, Aubrey Alston and Tamer Refaei of The MITRE Corporation presented an exact solution to this problem which utilizes an in-packet cryptographic mechanism to remove the ability of high-volume Interest traffic to overload the distribution infrastructure of the network.^[4]