An Efficient Homomorphic MAC with Small Key Size for Authentication in Network Coding
Cheng Chi, Tao Jiang · IEEE Transactions on Computers · 2012
Recently, homomorphic message authentication code (MAC) schemes have been proposed to resist against pollution attacks in network coding. However, existing methods face a common challenge: the generated MAC t belongs to a small finite field Fq, which means that an adversary could attack by randomly guessing the value of t, and succeed with probability 1/q. Since q is a predetermined system parameter which is typically set as 28, the resulted security 1/256 could be unsatisfactory in practice. In this paper, we propose an efficient homomorphic MAC for authentication in network coding. The proposed method achieves a reliable security parameter 1/qlusing only one key, where l could be chosen according to different security requirements. Compared with previous approaches that using multiple tags, the proposed homomorphic MAC has both low computation and communication overheads.