THIS PAPER IS ELIGIBLE FOR THE STU-DENT PAPER AWARD" We consider the level of information security provided by random linear network coding in network scenarios in which all nodes comply with the communication protocols yet are assumed to be potential eavesdroppers (i.e. "nice but curious"). For this setup, which differs from wiretapping scenarios considered previously, we develop a natural algebraic security criterion, and prove several of its key properties. A preliminary analysis of the impact of network topology on the overall network coding security, in particular for complete directed acyclic graphs, is also included.
Under the emerging network coding paradigm, intermediate nodes in the network
are allowed not only to store and forward packets but also to process and mix
different data flows. We propose a low-complexity cryptographic scheme that
exploits the inherent security provided by random linear network coding and
offers the advantage of reduced overhead in comparison to traditional
end-to-end encryption of the entire data. Confidentiality is achieved by
protecting (or "locking") the source coefficients required to decode the
encoded data, without preventing intermediate nodes from running their standard
network coding operations. Our scheme can be easily combined with existing
techniques that counter active attacks.Comment: Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC
2008), Beijing, China, May 200
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