Network Coding Security: Attacks and Countermeasures

TL;DR

This paper reviews security challenges in network coding, categorizes vulnerabilities, compares with traditional routing, and discusses cryptographic solutions and research challenges for practical secure network coding deployment.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive taxonomy of security vulnerabilities in network coding and explores how its properties can enable more efficient security solutions than classical routing.

Findings

Network coding introduces unique security vulnerabilities.

Certain properties of network coding enable stronger security solutions.

Practical integration of cryptography with network coding is feasible.

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.