Tag Pollution Research Articles

Security Analysis of an Efficient Null Space-Based Homomorphic MAC Scheme Against Tag Pollution Attacks in RLNC

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.

An efficient homomorphic MAC-based scheme against data and tag pollution attacks in network coding-enabled wireless networks

Recent research efforts have shown that wireless networks can benefit from network coding (NC) technology in terms of bandwidth, robustness to packet losses, delay and energy consumption. However, NC-enabled wireless networks are susceptible to a severe security threat, known as data pollution attack, where a malicious node injects into the network polluted packets that prevent the destination nodes from decoding correctly. Due to recoding, occurred at the intermediate nodes, according to the core principle of NC, the polluted packets propagate quickly into other packets and corrupt bunches of legitimate packets leading to network resource waste. Hence, a lot of research effort has been devoted to schemes against data pollution attacks. Homomorphic MAC-based schemes are a promising solution against data pollution attacks. However, most of them are susceptible to a new type of pollution attack, called tag pollution attack, where an adversary node randomly modifies tags appended to the end of the transmitted packets. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient homomorphic message authentication code-based scheme, called HMAC, providing resistance against data pollution attacks and tag pollution attacks in NC-enabled wireless networks. Our proposed scheme makes use of three types of homomorphic tags (i.e., MACs, D-MACs and one signature) which are appended to the end of the coded packet. Our results show that the proposed HMAC scheme is more efficient compared to other competitive tag pollution immune schemes in terms of complexity, communication overhead and key storage overhead.

An Efficient Null Space-Based Homomorphic MAC Scheme Against Tag Pollution Attacks in RLNC

This letter proposes an efficient null space-based homomorphic message authentication code scheme providing resistance against tag pollution attacks in random linear network coding, where these attacks constitute a severe security threat. In contrast to data pollution attacks, where an adversary injects into the network corrupted packets, in tag pollution attacks the adversary corrupts (i.e. pollutes) tags appended to the end of the coded packets to prevent the destination nodes from decoding correctly. Our results show that the proposed scheme is more efficient compared to other competitive tag pollution immune schemes in terms of computational complexity.

Dual-Homomorphic Message Authentication Code Scheme for Network Coding-Enabled Wireless Sensor Networks

Network coding has shown a considerable improvement in terms of capacity and robustness compared to traditional store-and-forward transmission paradigm. However, since the intermediate nodes in network coding-enabled networks have the ability to change the packets en route, network coding-enabled networks are vulnerable to pollution attacks where a small number of polluted messages can corrupt bunches of legitimate messages. Recently, research effort has been put on schemes for protecting the transmitted messages against data pollution attacks. However, most of them cannot resist tag pollution attacks. This paper presents a new homomorphic MAC-based scheme, called Dual-Homomorphic MAC (Dual-HMAC), for network coding-enabled wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme makes use of two types of tags (i.e., MACs and D-MACs) to provide resistance against data pollution attacks and partially tag pollution attacks. Furthermore, our proposed scheme presents low communication overhead and low computational complexity compared to other existing schemes.

A Tag Encoding Scheme against Pollution Attack to Linear Network Coding

Network coding allows intermediate nodes to encode data packets to improve network throughput and robustness. However, it increases the propagation speed of polluted data packets if a malicious node injects fake data packets into the network, which degrades the bandwidth efficiency greatly and leads to incorrect decoding at sinks. In this paper, insights on new mathematical relations in linear network coding are presented and a key predistribution-based tag encoding scheme KEPTE is proposed, which enables all intermediate nodes and sinks to detect the correctness of the received data packets. Furthermore, the security of KEPTE with regard to pollution attack and tag pollution attack is quantitatively analyzed. The performance of KEPTE is competitive in terms of: low computational complexity; the ability that all intermediate nodes and sinks detect pollution attack; the ability that all intermediate nodes and sinks detect tag pollution attack; and high fault-tolerance ability. To the best of our knowledge, the existing key predistribution-based schemes aiming at pollution detection can only achieve at most three points as described above. Finally, discussions on the application of KEPTE to practical network coding are also presented.

Effect of active interference on the performance of radio frequency identification systems

Recent advancements in wireless technology have resulted in an unprecedented demand for Radio Frequency (RF) spectral resources. Increasing frequency reuse also increases RF interference, which decreases a system's capacity and/or service quality. The primary focus of this research was the development of a test protocol for the characterisation of the performance of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems when active interference was present. The test protocol was comprised of four different experiments: Jamming on Central Frequency of Operation, Apply Full Range of Frequencies in Sweeps, Modulating the Jamming Signal and Tag Pollution. The effectiveness of the test protocol was verified by fully characterising eight RFID systems operating at frequencies that ranged from 120 kHz to 2.45 GHz. The performance measure of read rate was utilised to assess whether or not the jamming signal had an effect on the performance of the RFID systems. The results obtained through actual experimentation, as well as the validation by experts in the RFID field, indicate that the approach described in this research is viable and useful for both manufacturers and users of RFID technology.