Naming in content-oriented architectures

There have been several recent proposals for content-oriented network architectures whose underlying mechanisms are surprisingly similar in spirit, but which differ in many details. In this paper we step back from the mechanistic details and focus only on the area where the these approaches have a fundamental difference: naming. In particular, some designs adopt a hierarchical, human-readable names, whereas others use self-certifying names. When discussing a network architecture, three of the most important requirements are security, scalability, and flexibility. In this paper we examine the two different naming approaches in terms of these three basic goals.