Pollution Attacks In Network Coding Research Articles

Defending pollution attacks in network coding enabled wireless ad hoc networks: a game‐theoretic framework

Network coding is a promising technique to improve the throughput and robustness of wireless ad hoc networks. However, the packet-mixing nature of network coding also renders it more prone to pollution attacks. Most existing schemes to combat pollution attacks did not consider the defender's resource limit, nor the trade-off between defensive performance and other metrics such as delay and resource consumption. The authors investigate how to achieve such a trade-off optimally by proposing a two-player strategic game model between the attack and the defender. In this model, the utilities of both players are well defined, and thus the defender can obtain its best strategy by maximising its utility. To do so, a graph-based simulated annealing algorithm is proposed to derive the utility-maximising strategy. Finally, they conduct extensive experiments to evaluate their scheme from different aspects. The results show that their scheme can achieve better utility than existing schemes, and is more computationally efficient in the meanwhile. Moreover, their scheme can obtain a sub-optimal solution within a small number of iterations, which implies that it can be implemented in the short-session communication scenario where it is required to find a sufficiently good solution within a short time.

On Security Against Pollution Attacks in Network Coding Enabled 5G Networks

Future communication networks need to harness the available spectrum more efficiently to cater the requirements of the ever-increasing digital devices. Higher data rate with low latency is a major requirement of future communication networks. Network coding is arising once more as an enabler for satisfying the bandwidth requirements of future multimedia and resource hungry services. However, network coding techniques suffer from security vulnerabilities that will eliminate any bandwidth profits. Specific attacks in network coding like pollution attacks are extremely dangerous due to the nature of encoding and spreading inside the whole network. They deteriorate the bandwidth efficiency and even disrupt proper decoding of any message at the receiving end. Further, in a wireless environment, the authenticity of intermediate nodes is not easy to ensure, making it easier for an attacker to be part of the network. Thus counteracting pollution attacks in network coding becomes very important for practical applications of network coding enabled networks in the future generations of mobile communication. There has been a lot of research interest in this direction resulting in a few interesting approaches for secure network coding. However, most of the schemes fail to meet the expected standards or incur high overheads to the system. Schemes addressing the dense heterogeneous networks efficiently are yet to be proposed. This study surveys the security vulnerabilities of network coding, particularly those imposed by pollution attacks, as well as, the corresponding countermeasures. The survey goes a step further and includes a potential secure implementation of network coding enabled 5G networks, based on cooperating small cells.

Characterization of Band Codes for Pollution-Resilient Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming

We provide a comprehensive characterization of band codes (BC) as a resilient-by-design solution to pollution attacks in network coding (NC)-based peer-to-peer live video streaming. Consider one malicious node injecting bogus coded packets into the network: the recombinations at the nodes generate an avalanche of novel coded bogus packets. Therefore, the malicious node can cripple the communication by injecting into the network only a handful of polluted packets. Pollution attacks are typically addressed by identifying and isolating the malicious nodes from the network. Pollution detection is, however, not straightforward in NC as the nodes exchange coded packets. Similarly, malicious nodes identification is complicated by the ambiguity between malicious nodes and nodes that have involuntarily relayed polluted packets. This paper addresses pollution attacks through a radically different approach which relies on BCs. BCs are a family of rateless codes originally designed for controlling the NC decoding complexity in mobile applications. Here, we exploit BCs for the totally different purpose of recombining the packets at the nodes so to avoid that the pollution propagates by adaptively adjusting the coding parameters. Our streaming experiments show that BCs curb the propagation of the pollution and restore the quality of the distributed video stream.

Security Analysis and Improvements on Two Homomorphic Authentication Schemes for Network Coding

Recently, based on the homomorphic signatures, the authentication schemes, such as homomorphic subspace signature (HSS) and key predistribution-based tag encoding (KEPTE), have been proposed to resist against pollution attacks in network coding. In this paper, we show that there exists an efficient multi-generation pollution attack on HSS and KEPTE. In particular, we show that using packets and their signatures of different generations, the adversary can create invalid packets and their corresponding signatures that pass the verification of HSS and KEPTE at intermediate the nodes as well as at the destination nodes. After giving a more generic attack, we analyze the cause of the proposed attack. We then propose the improved key distribution schemes for HSS and KEPTE, respectively. Next, we show that the proposed key distribution schemes can combat against the proposed multi-generation pollution attacks. Finally, we analyze the computation and communication costs of the proposed key distribution schemes for HSS and KEPTE, and by implementing experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed schemes add acceptable burden on the system.

A Generic Construction of Homomorphic MAC for Multi-File Transmission in Network Coding

—Homomorphic message authentication codes (MAC) have been proposed to thwart pollution attacks in network coding. The existing schemes mainly are based on the vector inner product or trace function over finite fields. Recently, Wang and Hu presented a generic construction of homomorphic MAC scheme based on linear mapping over finite fields which is an excellent abstract of the vector inner product and the trace function. However, their construction can only be used for single-file transmission. In this paper, we convert their scheme into a new one that supports multi-file transmission. Moreover, our scheme needs shorter key when one wants to achieve the same security as that of Wang et al.

Homomorphic MAC-based scheme against pollution attacks in network coding

Network coding can improve network throughput in large, but it is vulnerable to the data pollution attacks. In this paper, we propose an efficient homomorphic message authentication code (MAC) scheme with discrete logarithm to detect and locate the malicious nodes. We also prove the security property of the scheme theoretically. Its effectiveness is demonstrated, and overhead is analyzed through extensive experiments.

An Efficient Homomorphic MAC with Small Key Size for Authentication in Network Coding

Recently, homomorphic message authentication code (MAC) schemes have been proposed to resist against pollution attacks in network coding. However, existing methods face a common challenge: the generated MAC t belongs to a small finite field F <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">q</sub> , which means that an adversary could attack by randomly guessing the value of t, and succeed with probability 1/q. Since q is a predetermined system parameter which is typically set as 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">8</sup> , the resulted security 1/256 could be unsatisfactory in practice. In this paper, we propose an efficient homomorphic MAC for authentication in network coding. The proposed method achieves a reliable security parameter 1/q <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">l</sup> using only one key, where l could be chosen according to different security requirements. Compared with previous approaches that using multiple tags, the proposed homomorphic MAC has both low computation and communication overheads.

Cooperative Defense Against Pollution Attacks in Network Coding Using SpaceMac

Intra-session network coding is inherently vulnerable to pollution attacks. In this paper, first, we introduce a novel homomorphic MAC scheme called SpaceMac, which allows an intermediate node to verify whether received packets belong to a specific subspace, even if the subspace is expanding over time. Then, we use SpaceMac as a building block to design a cooperative scheme that provides complete defense against pollution attacks: (i) it can detect polluted packets early at intermediate nodes, and (ii) it can identify the exact location of all, even colluding, attackers, thus making it possible to eliminate them. Our scheme is cooperative: parents and children of any node cooperate to detect any corrupted packets sent by the node, and nodes in the network cooperate with a central controller to identify the exact location of all attackers. We implement SpaceMac in both C/C++ and Java as a library, which we make publicly available. Our evaluation on both a PC and an Android device shows that the SpaceMac algorithms can be computed quickly and efficiently and that our cooperative defense scheme has low computation overhead and significantly lower communication overhead than those of state-of-the-art schemes.

A Novel Homomorphic MAC Scheme for Authentication in Network Coding

Recently, homomorphic message authentication code (MAC) schemes have been proposed to thwart pollution attacks in network coding. However, existing schemes adopt the inner product operation to construct the MAC, which could be broken with probability Pr=1/q, where the predetermined system parameter q is typically set as 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">8</sup> . Usually, the homomorphic MAC with a security parameter Pr=1/2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">8</sup> may not be sufficient in practice. In this letter, we propose a novel scheme and its key idea is to employ the trace function over a finite field to construct the homomorphic MAC. The proposed method could achieve a reliable security Pr=1/q <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">l</sup> without increasing the field size or employing multiple keys, where l is a positive integer greater than or equal to 1.