CoP: An ultra-lightweight secure network coding scheme via last forwarder's proof

Network coding can improve network efficiency by extending copy-and-forward paradigm to code-and-forward paradigm. It thus imposes a security problem called pollution attack that some network coding or forwarding nodes may intentionally fabricate, modify, forge, or drop packets. Recently, many authentication methods are proposed to guarantee the correctness of encoding and forwarding results via the verification from receivers. Those methods include homomorphic hashing, homomorphic message authentication code, and homomorphic signature. However, those schemes result in expensive computation overhead due to the homomorphic cryptographic primitives, so that those methods will not be able to work in most applications that confront resource constraints. In this paper, we propose an ultra-lightweight checking protocol to guarantee the secure network coding without any homomorphic cryptographic primitives. The extensive analysis proofs that it has following advantages: the least security assumption for intermediate nodes, the least cryptographic primitive requirement, ultra-lightweight computation, flexible message length with probably proof, and minimal rounds in terms of message exchanging.