Abstract
Recently, Esfahani, Mantas, and Rodriguez proposed a homomorphic message authentication code (MAC) scheme for the random linear network coding (RLNC) to resist tag pollution attacks (TPAs), and also presented the security analysis. As Esfahani et al. said, their scheme is based on the null space properties of Kehdi and Li, and the main contribution lies in adding the process of swapping when generating the tags for data packets. However, in this paper, we first point out that Esfahani et al.'s swapping technique is not essential for the TPA security, because the underlying non-swapping homomorphic MAC scheme has been secure against TPA and the process of swapping only improves the TPA security with a non-negligible factor. More importantly, we find that the security proof of Esfahani et al. is incorrect and misguided. In particular, according to Esfahani et al. suggestion, one should enlarge the number of neighbor nodes to reduce the probability of the TPA. However, this paper gives contrary suggestions in Esfahani et al.'s work by presenting the precise proof for the proposed homomorphic MAC scheme.
Highlights
Random linear network coding scheme allows the intermediate nodes to randomly mix the packets they received before forwarding them, which has been theoretically proven to maximize the network throughput [2], [7], [15], [16]
In EMR-scheme, the generated tags are swapped with the data part they authenticate with the help of a secret swapping value SV, which increases the difficulty of launching tag pollution attacks (TPAs)
In [10], Kim discussed the incorrectness of another homomorphic message authentication code (MAC) scheme with small key size for authentication in network coding
Summary
Random linear network coding scheme allows the intermediate nodes (or routers) to randomly mix the packets they received before forwarding them, which has been theoretically proven to maximize the network throughput [2], [7], [15], [16]. In contrast to data pollution attack, TPA refers to that the adversaries only pollute the tags, which are usually appended to the end of packets, while keeping the data part unchanged. In EMR-scheme, the generated tags are swapped with the data part they authenticate with the help of a secret swapping value SV , which increases the difficulty of launching TPA. They analyzed probabilities of guessing SV and launching TPA for an adversary node. In this comment, we first point out the underlying non-swapped homomorphic MAC scheme We draw the opposite conclusion (for the EMR-scheme): The larger the number of neighbor nodes, the bigger the probability of TPA
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