the research architecture that rebuilds networking around requesting DATA BY NAME instead of connecting to hosts - every data packet signed, any node able to cache and serve, trust computed from names.
Interest out, signed data back, any cache serving - the two-decade bet this paper inherits from.
Etymology and backstory
Van Jacobson - one of TCP/IP's great engineers - delivered the founding provocation in a 2006 Google talk: the network is a distribution system being used as a conversation system. Content-Centric Networking (CCN, his 2009 CoNEXT paper) became the NDN project under NSF's Future Internet Architecture program, led by Lixia Zhang at UCLA. Interest packets request names; data packets carry name, content, and signature; routers forward on name prefixes and cache opportunistically.
Ecosystem
a two-decade research program with running code, testbeds, and the trust-schema literature codexproof inherits (schematizing, LVS, signed web objects, FLIC). Never displaced IP - the honest reading is that its IDEAS escaped the forwarding plane and won elsewhere.
In codexproof
the deepest inheritance, bounded explicitly (the paper's inherited-versus-new passage survived three reviewers reaching for the same knife). Kept: self-certifying data, schematized trust, verify-anywhere. Dropped: the entire forwarding plane - codexproof stays on boring HTTP. Added: PROV-typed lineage fused to content addressing, JIT capture, mandatory fail-closed revocation freshness. The ally inversion for Tempe: an NDN author reads the paper as their machinery winning new territory (TALK-PREP).