A null space based defense for pollution attacks in network coding
Andrew J. Newell, Cristina Nita-Rotaru · Annual Information Security Symposium · 2011
A network coding system allows intermediate nodes of a network to code packets together which ultimately results in better network performance. Due to the nature of network coding, it is difficult to impose hop-by-hop data integrity as intermediate nodes change packet contents. Without hop-by-hop data integrity, a byzantine adversary can mount a denial of service attack (pollution attack) which cripples a network coding system. Much work has focused on pollution defenses, but they all have limitations in terms of time synchronization, expensive computations, and large coding headers. A recent solution based on null spaces [3] has the potential to escape the aforementioned limitations. However, their solution does not work for arbitrary network topologies. We propose a new protocol with a novel null space splitting technique that ensures practical defense for arbitrary topologies.