USING FORENSIC TRAILS TO MITIGATE EFFECTS OF A POISONED CACHE

A content delivery network may store forensic trail metadata for cache entries in order to identify and evict poisoned cache entries, mitigating the effects of a poisoned cache due to corrupted cache servers. Each entry of a cache server may include the cached item as well as forensic metadata. The forensic metadata includes identifiers for cache servers that the item was served from, as well as a timestamp for the time that the item was served. The cache server also maintains a list of corrupted servers, as well as a time window for each corrupted server. The cache server determines, based on the list of corrupted servers and the forensic metadata, whether to evict cache entries.