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

TL;DR

IoT-5G convergence enables scalable, low-latency services but introduces security challenges in content-centric architectures. The paper surveys security solutions across cryptographic mechanisms, trust management models, and access control/privacy, evaluating their fitness for constrained IoT devices and decentralized CCN-5G scenarios, with emphasis on edge computing and ML-based defenses. It contributes a taxonomy and critical assessment of existing work, identifying gaps in confidentiality, privacy, and scalable trust, and outlines trends such as lightweight crypto, blockchain-based trust, and post-quantum approaches. The work provides a practical guide for researchers and practitioners designing secure CCN-enabled IoT-5G systems and informs future standardization and deployment efforts.

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.