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https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite

CCN-lite, a lightweight implementation of the CCNx protocol and its variations
https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite

ccn-forwarder ccn-lite ccnx ccnx-protocol icn interoperability iot-platform ndn networking

Last synced: 16 days ago
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CCN-lite, a lightweight implementation of the CCNx protocol and its variations

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README 

          
![](doc/logo/ccn-lite-logo-712x184.png)



# Status of Automatic Tests



[![Build Status](https://semaphoreci.com/api/v1/cn-unibas/ccn-lite/branches/master/badge.svg)](https://semaphoreci.com/cn-unibas/ccn-lite)



(Currently, CCN-lite V2 supports only automatic build testing, there are no functionality tests)



# Overview



*Jump to the [Table of Contents](#toc)*



CCN-lite is a reduced and lightweight -- yet functionally

interoperable -- implementation of the CCNx and NDN protocols. It covers:



- PARC's [Content Centric Networking Protocol](http://www.ccnx.org/), both the old (v0.8) and new (v1.0) variant,

- the [Named-Data Networking project](http://named-data.net/)



CCN-lite supports multiple platforms, including:



- Linux and OS X user space

- Linux kernel

- Android

- RIOT OS



CCN-lite is meant as a code base for class room work, experimental

extensions and simulation experiments. The ISC license makes it an

excellent starting point for commercial products.



CCN-lite has been included in the RIOT operating system for the

Internet of Things (IoT): http://www.riot-os.org/





### Table of Contents

1. [Getting started](#gettingstarted)

2. [Rationale for CCN-lite](#rationale)

3. [Extensions](#extensions)

4. [CCN-lite supported platforms](#platforms)

5. [Command line tools](#lof)

6. [Useful links](#links)

7. [Tentative roadmap](#roadmap)

8. [Changelog](#changelog)

9. [Credits](#credits)





## 1. Getting started



To start right now with CCN-lite visit the [tutorial](tutorial/tutorial.md). It

covers installation on Unix and basic functionality of CCN-lite.



For more information about CCN-lite supported platforms and how to build, see

[CCN-lite supported platforms](#platforms). The source code of CCN-lite is

available on [GitHub](https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite/), either the

`master` branch or `dev-master`. If you found a bug or want to report a problem

with CCN-lite, feel free to

[create an issue](https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite/issues) on GitHub - we

appreciate it!





## 2. Rationale for CCN-lite



The original motivation in 2011 for creating CCN-lite was that PARC's CCNx

router software had grown huge. CCN-lite provides a lean alternative for

educational purposes and as a stepping stone. It's for those who want a simple

piece of software for experimentation or own development, but who do not need

all features of the full thing.



This brings the interesting question of interoperability: What minimum

functionality is necessary in order to participate in a CCNx network? With

CCN-lite, we have made a first attempt at identifying that set, but we are aware

that this set might be incomplete, or may change depending on how CCNx evolves.

We consider this question of "sufficient CCNx functionality" to be of

engineering and academic interest of its own and welcome contributions from

everybody.



Hence, with CCN-lite, we did a race-to-the-bottom and strived for a kind of

"Level-0" interoperability. Level-0, as we understood it, covers:



- ccnb encoding of messages (or any other encoding flavor, including the TLV variants)

- PIT and FIB, basic CCN data structures

- longest and exact prefix matching for basic CCN operations,

  including minsuffixcomp und maxsuffixcomp handling

- matching of publisher's public key to fight cache poisoning

- nonce and/or hop limit tracking to avoid loops as a minimal safeguard



As an interoperability goal we set for ourselves the threshold that the CCN-lite

software must be able to route at the CCN level between fully fledged CCNx

forwarders. Of course, this is a moving target, but we regularly use our tools

to interface with the NDN testbed, for example.



We deliberately do not cover in our CCN-lite code:



- sophisticated data structures for performance optimizations

- exclusion filtering in interests

- all TCP connectivity and the old CCNx cmd line utilities that have TCP

  hardwired into them

- crypto functionality which is not our prime concern (yet)

- repository functionality, SYNC server, ...



A second reason to create CCN-lite was the software license (the original CCNx

project picked GNU, but NDN also has chosen this path) where we prefer a

Berkeley Software Distribution style of "do whatever you want" as we believe

that this will help adopting CCN technology. Therefore, CCN-lite is released

under the ISC license. We have learned that several companies have picked up

CCN-lite for their internal experiments, so we think our license choice was

right.



What you get with CCN-lite is:



- a tiny core and forwarder

- multiple platform support

- little memory usage, runs on IOT platforms with less than 10k ram

- libraries for applications (e.g. packet encoding libraries)

- partially interoperable management protocol implementation

- a simple HTTP server to display the relay's internal configuration

- plus some interesting extensions of our own, see the next section.

- little dependencies: cmake and openssl





## 3. Extensions



In several selected areas we have started our own contributions that are now

part of CCN-lite:



- Experimental *RPC functionality* for letting neighbors mutually invoke

  functions, which could be the starting point both for network management

  functionality and for data marshalling (of interests and data objects) using

  the TLV encoding.



- Clean *packet scheduler support* at chunk level as well as packet or fragment

  level (symbol `USE_SCHEDULER`)



- *Packet fragmentation* and lost packet detection support for running the CCNx

  protocol natively over Ethernet (symbol `USE_FRAG`). This is somehow outdated

  and waits for protocol specs to emerge.



Other features that you can switch on and off at compile time are:



Featue             | Description

:----------------- | :---------------------------------------------------------

`USE_CCNxDIGEST`   | Enable digest component, requires crypto lib.

`USE_CHEMFLOW`     | Experimental scheduler based on chemical networking, source not included.

`USE_DEBUG`        | Basic data structure dumping.

`USE_DEBUG_MALLOC` | Compile with memory armoring.

`USE_DUP_CHECK`    | Check for duplicate nonces.

`USE_ECHO`         | Enable an echo prefix, returning the current time.

`USE_LINKLAYER`    | Talk to Ethernet, W-LAN, 802.15.4 devices, raw frames.

`USE_FRAG`         | Enable fragments, to run CCNx over Ethernet.

`USE_HMAC256`      | Enables hash-based message authentication codes.

`USE_HTTP_STATUS`  | Provide status info for web browsers.

`USE_IPV4`         | Enable IP support.

`USE_LOGGING`      | Enable log messages.

`USE_KITE`         | Routing along the return path, not yet supported.

`USE_MGMT`         | React to CCNx management protocol messages.

`USE_SCHEDULER`    | Rate control at CCNx msg and fragment level.

`USE_SIGNATURES`   | Authenticate management messages.

`USE_STATS`        | Enable statistics.

`USE_SUITE_*`      | Enable a specific protocol: CCNB, NDNTLV (NDN 2014), CCNTLV (CCNx2014), or LOCALRPC and COMPRESSED (for packet compression)

`USE_UNIXSOCKET`   | Add UNIX IPC to the set of interfaces.



The approach for these extensions is that one can tailor a CCN forwarder to

including only those features really necessary.  We have strived to make these

choices as orthogonal as possible and invite you to attempt the same for your

additions.





## 4. CCN-lite supported platforms and how to compile



CCN-lite currently supports five platforms. To find out how to install and use

CCN-lite on each individual platform, refer to the platform-specific readme

files:



 * [Unix](doc/README-unix.md)

 * [Linux kernel](doc/README-kernel.md)

 * [Android](doc/README-android.md)



Additionally, CCN-lite has a pre-built [Dockerfile](Dockerfile) to enable the usage of

[Docker](https://www.docker.com/) with CCN-lite. See the

[Docker-specific readme file](doc/README-docker.md) for more information.





## 5. Command line tools



The commandline tools can be found in the ccnl-utils folder

The main command line tools and their corresponding source file that are shipped

with CCN-lite are the following:



Tool                           | Description

:----------------------------- | :---------------------------------------------

`ccn-lite-relay`               | CCN-lite forwarder: user space.

`ccn-lite-lxkernel`            | CCN-lite forwarder: Linux kernel module

`ccn-lite-ctrl`                | Command line program running the CCNx management protocol (over Unix sockets). Used for configuring a running relay either running in user space or as a kernel module.

`ccn-lite-ccnb2xml`            | Simple CCNB packet parser

`ccn-lite-cryptoserver`        | Used by the kernel module to carry out compute intensive crypto operations in user instead of kernel space.

`ccn-lite-fetch  `             | Fetches both a single chunk content or a series of chunks for larger named data. Only the content is returned without any protocol bytes.

`ccn-lite-mkC  `               | Simple content composer, to stdout, without crypto.

`ccn-lite-mkF  `               | Simple tool to split a large file into a fragment series.

`ccn-lite-mkI  `               | Simple interest composer, to stdout.

`ccn-lite-peek`                | Simple interest injector waiting for a content chunk.

`ccn-lite-pktdump`             | Powerful packet dumper for all known packet formats. Output is in hexdump style, XML or content only.

`ccn-lite-produce`             | Creates a series of chunks for data that does not fit into a single PDU.

`ccn-lite-rpc`                 | Send an RPC request and return the reply.

`ccn-lite-valid`               | Demo application for validating a packet's signature.





## 6. Links:



 - Source code repository:

   https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite

 - CCN-lite web site:

   http://www.ccn-lite.net/

 - CCNx site:

   http://www.ccnx.org/

 - NDN site:

   http://named-data.net/





## 8. Changelog

### [Release 2.0.1 beta](https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite/releases/tag/2.0.1) (Jun 2018)



 - Last NFN Release, further versions will not contain NFN, see [FAQ](https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite/wiki/Frequently-asked-questions)

 - Add: Documentation

 - Bugfixes

 - CVE patches

 - Removed unused IOTTLV and CISTLV Packet formats.



### [Release 2.0.0 beta](https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite/releases/tag/2.0.0) (Nov 2017)



 - Restructuration of the Code to a library system

   Code was split to following libraries:

	- ccnl-core: basic data structures

        - ccnl-fwd:  forwarding functionality of CCN-lite

        - ccnl-pkt:  packet encoding library, can be used for end point application with no forwarding requirements

        - ccnl-riot: RIOT integration library 

 - change build system to cmake

 - add further RIOT support 

        - add compressed packet format in an early stage

 - Fix a lot of Bugs

 - Fix some CVEs (discovered by Eric Sesterhenn / X41 D-Sec):

   CVE-2017-12412, CVE-2017-12464, CVE-2017-12465, CVE-2017-12466, CVE-2017-12467, CVE-2017-12468, CVE-2017-12469, CVE-2017-12471, CVE-2017-12472 



### [Release 0.3.0](https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite/releases/tag/0.3.0) (Jul 2015)



 - Demonstrated interoperability with now-stabilized CCNx1.0, which can run

   side-by-side with NDN in a single CCN-lite relay

 - OMNeT++ integration is back, as it has been requested many times

 - New platforms and transport:

    - Arduino and RFduino

    - Android and Bluetooth Low Energy

 - New functionality: "begin-end" fragmentation for CCNx1.0 and NDN

 - Improved build quality for Ubuntu and OSX

 - Improved READMEs all over the release, easy tutorials

 - Named Function Networking (NFN) over NDN now has Python bindings to make the

   publishing of named functions easier.





## 9. Credits

### [Release 2.0.1 beta](https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite/releases/tag/2.0.1) (Jun 2018)



#### Code contributions:

Michael Frey (MSA Safety)     

Cenk Gündogan (HAW Hamburg)    

Eric Sesterhenn (X41-DSec)    

Peter Kietzmann (HAW Hamburg)    

Martine Lenders (FU Berlin)    

Claudio Marxer (Uni Basel)     

Dima Mansour (Uni Basel)    

Christian Tschudin (Uni Basel)

Christopher Scherb (Uni Basel)    



### [Release 2.0.0 beta](https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite/releases/tag/2.0.0) (Nov 2017)



#### Code contributions:

Christopher Scherb   

Balazs Faludi  

Claudio Marxer  

Cenk Gündogan  

Eric Sesterhenn  

Christian F. Tschudin  



### [Release 0.3.0](https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite/releases/tag/0.3.0) (Jul 2015)



#### Code contributions:

Lukas Beck  

Christopher Scherb  

Manolis Sifalakis  

Christian F. Tschudin  



#### Feedback and other contributions:

Fateh Al-Mufti  

Frederik Brix  

Patrick Buder  

Daniel Federau  

Ilir Fetai  

Nenad Kokeza  

David Kordsmeier  

Dima Mansour  

Marc Mosko  

Mihai Daniel Rapcea  

Fabian Rauschenbach  

Yanick Salzmann  

Maarten Schenk  

Marco Suter

Marc-Andrea Tarnutzer  

Marco Dieter Vogt  

Akan Yilmaz  



### [Release 0.2.0](https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite/releases/tag/0.2.0) (Dec 2014)



#### Code contributions:

Basil Kohler  

Christian Mehlis  

Massimo Monti  

Christopher Scherb  

Manolis Sifalakis  

Christian F. Tschudin  



#### Code and documentation feedback:

Samuel Bader  

Christoph Betschart  

Nore Derguti  

Ralph Droms  

Wilson A. Eghonghon  

Daniel Federau  

Ralph Gasser  

Cedric Geissmann  

Rasa Liebfried  

Dario Maggi  

Frank Müller  

Marko Obradovic  

Michaja Pressmar  

Mihai D. Rapcea  

Thomas Simonsen

Alexander Stiemer  

Ziba Tavassoli  

Simon Wang  

Mario Weber  



### [Release 0.1.0](https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite/releases/tag/0.1.0) (Jul 2013)



#### Code contributions:

Stefan Braun  

Pierre Imai  

Basil Kohler  

Thomas Meyer  

Massimo Monti  

Christopher Scherb  

Manolis Sifalakis  

Christian F. Tschudin