Computer Science and Engineering Colloquium Series

Securing Network Coding Against Pollution Attacks

Zhen Yu

Iowa State University

Thursday, April 10, 2008
9:45 am - 10:45 am
3105 Engineering

Abstract

Network coding allows forwarders to encode their input messages, rather than duplicating each of them. It is promising to maximize network throughput and has received more and more applications in peer-to-peer systems, wireless networks, and sensor networks. However, the applications built on top of network coding are vulnerable to pollution attacks, in which the compromised forwarders inject polluted or forged messages into networks. Existing schemes addressing pollution attacks either require an extra secure channel or incur high computation overhead.

In this talk, I will present an efficient signature scheme for filtering pollution attacks in linear network coding techniques. Our scheme exploits a novel homomorphic signature function to enable the source to delegate its signing authority to the forwarders, that is, the forwarders can generate the valid signatures for their output messages without contacting the source. This nice property allows the forwarders to verify the received messages, but prohibit them from creating polluted ones. Our scheme does not need any extra secure channels, and can provide source authentication. Experimental results show that it can improve computation efficiency up to ten times compared to some existing one.

Biography

Zhen Yu is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Engineering at Iowa State University. He received his B.S. degree in 1995 from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, and his M.S. degree in 2003 from Iowa State University, both in Electrical Engineering. His research interests are in information assurance and applied cryptography with emphasis on wireless networks, sensor networks and distributed systems.