Small Field Size for Secure Network Coding

TL;DR

This paper investigates the minimum field size needed for secure linear network codes, providing a new lower bound that suggests the field size can be significantly reduced, enhancing efficiency.

Contribution

The authors derive a new lower bound on the field size for secure linear network codes, improving upon existing results and enabling more efficient implementations.

Findings

New lower bound on field size for SLNCs

Field size can be further reduced in most cases

Enhanced understanding of secure network coding efficiency

Abstract

In network coding, information transmission often encounters wiretapping attacks. Secure network coding is introduced to prevent information from being leaked to adversaries. For secure linear network codes (SLNCs), the required field size is a very important index, because it largely determines the computational and space complexities of a SLNC, and it is also very important for the process of secure network coding from theoretical research to practical application. In this letter, we further discuss the required field size of SLNCs, and obtain a new lower bound. This bound shows that the field size of SLNCs can be reduced further, and much smaller than the known results for almost all cases.