Self-verifiable content using decentralized identifiers.

We propose a self-sovereign and decentralized naming scheme for Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures that makes content items self-verifiable. Our scheme is based on Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), an emerging identification scheme under standardization by the W3C. With our solution, DIDs are used as content name prefixes and act as the root of trust for the corresponding namespaces. A content item in our scheme includes tamper-proof metadata that can be used to verify its authenticity and integrity based only on the content’s name, without relying on a trusted third party. The owner of a DID can authorize content providers to publish items under a sub-space of its namespace, or even fully delegate the management of a sub-space of its namespace to a controlling entity. We implement our scheme for the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture and show that it removes the need for trusted third parties, enables hassle-free key rotation, and allows joint namespace ownership and namespace management delegation, with negligible computational and space overhead.