A commitment-based scheme for securing Vandermonde codes against pollution attacks

Forward error correction (FEC) allows the receiver to correct erasure without asking retransmission. This advantage is significant for several applications where retransmission is not available or desirable. In recent years, applying FEC codes to peer-to-peer data distribution networks is an innovation. In this way, the downloader can efficiently reconstruct the data from the encoding symbols multicasted from multiple distributors. However, FEC codes suffer from pollution attacks where the attackers corrupt some encoding symbols such that the data can not correctly be reconstructed. Although Krohn et al. propose a homomorphic hash based verification scheme, the scheme is specifically designed for Fountain codes and the variants. That is, the scheme can not apply to other FEC codes and suffers from another specific attacks, distribution attacks. Thus, in this paper we propose a new verification scheme for polynomial based FEC codes like Vandermonde codes. The scheme can defend against not only pollution attacks but distribution attacks. The analysis also shows the security and feasibility of the proposed scheme.