An efficient MAC-signature scheme for authentication in XOR network coding

An inherent weakness of network coding is that it is vulnerable to pollute attacks from adversaries, which may jeopardize its advantages such as throughput enhancement. Message Authentication Code (MAC) is commonly used scheme to provide integrity against data pollution by appending data and shared-key dependent tags. However, this scheme results in a new type of pollution called tag pollution, where a packet with polluted tags may traffic multiple hops before detection and result in network bandwidth waste. We propose a hybrid technical scheme, called MSXOR, which can detect tag pollution with low communication and computation overhead. We address the pollution attacks by designing an efficient MAC scheme suitable for multicast XOR network coding, and tag pollution attacks by appending a signature of all the MACs. Our experimental results show that it slightly increases the computation complexity, for the sake of resisting to tag pollution.