Paper 2010/060 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2010/060 ↗

Insecure ``Provably Secure Network Coding'' and Homomorphic Authentication Schemes for Network Coding

Abstract

Network coding allows the routers to mix the received information before forwarding them to the next nodes. Though this information mixing has been proven to maximize network throughput, it also introduces security challenges such as pollution attacks. A malicious node could insert a malicious packet into the system and this corrupted packet will propagate more quickly than in traditional copy-and-forward networks. Several authors have studied secure network coding from both information theoretic and probabilistic viewpoints. In this paper, we show that there are serious flaws in several of these schemes (the security ``proofs'' for these schemes were presented in these publications). Furthermore, we will propose a secure homomorphic authentication scheme for network coding.