Cooperative Defense against Pollution Attacks in Network Coding Using SpaceMac

TL;DR

This paper introduces SpaceMac, a homomorphic MAC scheme for network coding, and a cooperative defense system that detects and locates pollution attacks efficiently, with low overhead and practical implementation.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel homomorphic MAC scheme called SpaceMac and a cooperative defense scheme for pollution attacks in network coding, enabling early detection and attacker localization.

Findings

SpaceMac is efficient and quickly computed on various devices.

The cooperative scheme effectively detects and locates pollution attackers.

The scheme has lower communication overhead than existing solutions.

Abstract

Intra-session network coding is known to be vulnerable to pollution attacks. In this work, first, we introduce a novel homomorphic MAC scheme called SpaceMac, which allows an intermediate node to verify if its received packets belong to a specific subspace, even if the subspace is expanding over time. Then, we use SpaceMac as a building block to design a cooperative scheme that provides complete defense against pollution attacks: (i) it can detect polluted packets early at intermediate nodes and (ii) it can identify the exact location of all, even colluding, attackers, thus making it possible to eliminate them. Our scheme is cooperative: parents and children of any node cooperate to detect any corrupted packets sent by the node, and nodes in the network cooperate with a central controller to identify the exact location of all attackers. We implement SpaceMac in both C/C++ and Java as a library, and we make the library available online. Our evaluation on both a PC and an Android device shows that (i) SpaceMac's algorithms can be computed quickly and efficiently, and (ii) our cooperative defense scheme has low computation and significantly lower communication overhead than other comparable state-of-the-art schemes.