Security and Network Coding
Muriel Médard, Vipindev Adat Vasudevan, Morten Videbæk Pedersen, Ken R. Duffy · 2025
Security is a major concern in modern communication networks. Especially with large networks, ensuring confidentiality and integrity of communications poses a significant challenge. Network coding finds additional interesting applications in the provision of secure communication. It relies on the information-theoretic concepts to provide practical security solutions for future networks. On the other hand, network coding also raises some security concerns regarding the integrity of a message that originates from the mixing of packets in an unsecure network. In this chapter, we discuss both network coding-based security schemes and the approaches to ensure secure communication using network coding in untrusted environments. For security schemes based on network coding, we elaborate on hiding the equations, or the coefficients, using network coding to provide secure communication. To retain integrity in an untrusted environment with network coding, we discuss the idea of pollution attacks and how to efficiently detectthem.