An Effective Privacy-Preserving Data Coding in Peer-To-Peer Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces SCOPE, a lightweight cryptographic protocol that enhances COPE by encrypting private data and adding authentication, thereby improving privacy and security in peer-to-peer wireless networks.

Contribution

The paper proposes SCOPE, a novel cryptographic extension to COPE that secures private data against honest-but-curious and malicious attacks using ECC and ECDSA.

Findings

SCOPE effectively encrypts private data in COPE packets.

The protocol provides authentication to prevent malicious modifications.

Security proofs confirm SCOPE's robustness against targeted attacks.

Abstract

Coding Opportunistically (COPE) is a simple but very effective data coding mechanism in the wireless network. However, COPE leaves risks for attackers easily getting the private information saved in the packets, when they move through the network to their destination nodes. Hence in our work, a lightweight cryptographic approach, namely SCOPE, is proposed to consolidate COPE against the honest-but-curious and malicious attacks. Honest-but-curious attack serves adversaries who accurately obey the protocol but try to learn as much private information as possible for their curiosity. Additionally, this kind of attack is not destructive consequently. However, it may leave the backdoor for the more dangerous attacks carrying catastrophes to the system. Malicious attack tries to learn not only the private information but also modifies the packet on harmful purposes. In our work, the SCOPE protocol is defensive to the both attacks. The private information in the COPE packet are encrypted by Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), and an additional information is inserted into SCOPE packets served for the authentication process using the lightweight hash Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). We then prove our new protocol is still guaranteed to be a secure method of data coding, and to be light to effectively operate in the peer-to-peer wireless network