XOR network coding pollution prevention without homomorphic functions

Network coding is a way of transmitting information where nodes in a network combine incoming packets into a single one to increase throughput in some scenarios, nodes wishing to get the original information can perform decoding when enough packets have been received. Given its efficiency, the exclusive or (XOR) operation is very popular for network coding. One security concern for networks using network coding is the so called “pollution attack”, where an adversary introduces packets that are not combinations of the original ones. In this paper, we present a construction to prevent pollution attacks in XOR network coding that is suitable for networks where nodes must perform fast verifications. Unlike existing constructions in the literature which are based on XOR-homomorphic authentication functions, our construction can be instantiated with existing cryptographic primitives that are not related to the XOR operation. The core insight of our proposal is a carefully selected set of authenticated packets that are used to authenticate the network coding stream. We show that our proposal is computationally efficient at the intermediate nodes and that can be computed efficiently at the nodes which are generating the content.