Network Coding Security: Attacks and Countermeasures

Abstract: By allowing intermediate nodes to perform non-trivial operations on packets, such as mixing data from multiple streams, network coding breaks with the ruling store and forward networking paradigm and opens a myriad of challenging security questions. Following a brief overview of emerging network coding protocols, we provide a taxonomy of their security vulnerabilities, which highlights the differences between attack scenarios in which network coding is particularly vulnerable and other relevant cases in which the intrinsic properties of network coding allow for stronger and more efficient security solutions than classical routing. Furthermore, we give practical examples where network coding can be combined with classical cryptography both for secure communication and secret key distribution. Throughout the paper we identify a number of research challenges deemed relevant towards the applicability of secure network coding in practical networks.