Privacy risks in named data networking: what is the cost of performance?

Named Data Networking architectures have been proposed to improve various shortcomings of the current Internet architecture. A key part of these proposals is the capability of caching arbitrary content in arbitrary network locations. While caching has the potential to improve network performance, the data stored in caches can be seen as transient traces of past communication that attackers can exploit to compromise the users' privacy. With this editorial note, we aim to raise awareness of privacy attacks as an intrinsic and relevant issue in Named Data Networking architectures. Countermeasures against privacy attacks are subject to a trade-off between performance and privacy. We discuss several approaches to countermeasures representing different incarnations of this tradeoff, along with open issues to be looked at by the research community.