Lightweight Security for Network Coding

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight cryptographic scheme for network coding that enhances security by protecting source coefficients, reducing overhead, and allowing standard network operations without compromising confidentiality.

Contribution

It presents a novel low-complexity cryptographic method that leverages inherent network coding security and can be integrated with existing attack countermeasures.

Findings

Reduces cryptographic overhead compared to traditional encryption

Maintains network coding functionality while ensuring confidentiality

Compatible with existing security techniques against active attacks

Abstract

Under the emerging network coding paradigm, intermediate nodes in the network are allowed not only to store and forward packets but also to process and mix different data flows. We propose a low-complexity cryptographic scheme that exploits the inherent security provided by random linear network coding and offers the advantage of reduced overhead in comparison to traditional end-to-end encryption of the entire data. Confidentiality is achieved by protecting (or "locking") the source coefficients required to decode the encoded data, without preventing intermediate nodes from running their standard network coding operations. Our scheme can be easily combined with existing techniques that counter active attacks.