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.