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On the practicality of cryptographic defences against pollution attacks in wireless network coding

Published: 03 July 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Numerous practical systems based on network coding have been proposed in recent years demonstrating the wide range of benefits of network coding, such as increased throughput, reliability, and energy efficiency. However, network coding systems are inherently vulnerable to a severe attack, known as packet pollution, which presents a key obstacle to the deployment of such systems. Several cryptographic schemes have been proposed to defend against pollution attacks.
We conduct a detailed analysis and an experimental evaluation in a realistic wireless network coding setting of a set of representative cryptographic defenses against pollution attacks. Our analysis identifies severe limitations of asymmetric-based schemes, which impose high communication overhead by placing constraints on the basic network coding parameters and high computation overhead by relying on numerous operations over large fields. Our analysis also shows that symmetric cryptographic schemes, while having better performance than asymmetric cryptographic-based schemes, impose prohibitive overhead in the presence of multiple byzantine adversaries. We further evaluate these schemes by using a set of typical network coding system parameters on a realistic topology. Our experimental evaluation shows that all the schemes we compare induce a throughput degradation that negates the performance benefits of network coding in the presence of multiple colluding adversaries.

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      cover image ACM Computing Surveys
      ACM Computing Surveys  Volume 45, Issue 3
      June 2013
      575 pages
      ISSN:0360-0300
      EISSN:1557-7341
      DOI:10.1145/2480741
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 03 July 2013
      Accepted: 01 May 2012
      Revised: 01 April 2012
      Received: 01 March 2011
      Published in CSUR Volume 45, Issue 3

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      Author Tags

      1. Network coding
      2. pollution attacks
      3. wireless mesh networks

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      • (2016)A Unified Resource Allocation Framework for Defending Against Pollution Attacks in Wireless Network Coding SystemsIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2016.258131311:10(2255-2267)Online publication date: Oct-2016
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