Efficient Authentication Based on Orthogonality and Timeliness for Network Coding

Network coding provides a new data transmission paradigm for network protocols. However, the packets-mixture nature makes network coding systems notoriously susceptible to pollution attacks. Previous security solutions will incur high computation and transmission overhead, and they will be worse when facing malicious collusion attacks. In this paper, we propose an efficient authentication scheme, which allows participating nodes to efficiently detect corrupted packets based on orthogonality and timeliness. Our work is the first orthogonality and timeliness based solution to frustrate pollution attacks with arbitrary collusion. The security analysis shows that polluted packets can pass our authentication scheme with a very low probability. We also present simulations of our scheme, and results demonstrate the practicality and efficiency of our scheme.