An efficient lightweight security algorithm for random linear network coding

Recently, several encryption schemes have been presented to Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC). The recent proposed lightweight security system for Network Coding is based upon protecting the Global Encoding Vectors (GEV) and using other vector to ensure the encoding process of RLNC at intermediate nodes. However, the current lightweight security scheme, presents several practical challenges to be deployed in real applications. Furthermore, achieving a high security level results in high computational complexity and adds some communication overhead. In this paper, a new scheme is proposed to overcome the drawbacks of the lightweight security scheme and that can be used for RLNC real-time data exchange. First, the cryptographic primitive (AES in CTR mode) is replaced by another approach that is based on the utilization of a new flexible key-dependent invertible matrix (dynamic diffusion layer). Then, we show that this approach reduces the size of communication overhead of GEV from 2 × h to h elements. In addition to that, we also demonstrate that besides the information confidentially, both the packet integrity and the source authentication are attained with minimum computational complexity and memory overhead. Indeed, cryptographic strength of this scheme shows that the proposed scheme has sufficient security strength and good performance characteristics to ensure an efficient and simple implementation thus, facilitating the integration of this system in many applications that consider security as a principal requirement.