The increasing traffic volume and new requirements of highly scalable and efficient distribution of contents exceed the capabilities of the current Internet architecture. Information centric networking (ICN) is a new communication paradigm for the next generation internet (NGI), which focuses mainly on contents. ICN has in‐network caching capability, which enables any node to cache any content coming from any publisher. ICN subscribers are able to access contents from different distributed locations. This capability maximizes the problem of unauthorized access to ICN contents. In this paper, we propose a decentralized elliptic curve‐based access control (ECAC) protocol for ICN architectures. In this protocol, fewer public messages are needed for access control enforcement between ICN subscribers and ICN nodes than the existing access control protocols. ECAC protocol depends on ICN self‐certifying naming scheme. We perform security analysis on ECAC for the following attacks: man‐in‐the‐middle, forward security, replay attacks, integrity, and privacy violations. We also evaluate communication, computational, and storage overhead for performance analysis to ECAC. Based on our results that are obtained under various scenarios, ECAC efficiently prevents unauthorized access to ICN contents.