Security Threats in Network Coding-Enabled Mobile Small Cells

Abstract

The recent explosive growth of mobile data traffic, the continuously growing demand for higher data rates, and the steadily increasing pressure for higher mobility have led to the fifth-generation mobile networks. To this end, network-coding (NC)-enabled mobile small cells are considered as a promising 5G technology to cover the urban landscape by being set up on-demand at any place, and at any time on any device. In particular, this emerging paradigm has the potential to provide significant benefits to mobile networks as it can decrease packet transmission in wireless multicast, provide network capacity improvement, and achieve robustness to packet losses with low energy consumption. However, despite these significant advantages, NC-enabled mobile small cells are vulnerable to various types of attacks due to the inherent vulnerabilities of NC. Therefore, in this paper, we provide a categorization of potential security attacks in NC-enabled mobile small cells. Particularly, our focus is on the identification and categorization of the main potential security attacks on a scenario architecture of the ongoing EU funded H2020-MSCA project "SECRET" being focused on secure network coding-enabled mobile small cells.

IDLP: An Efficient Intrusion Detection and Location-Aware Prevention Mechanism for Network Coding-Enabled Mobile Small Cells

“…In data pollution attacks, the adversary tries to pollute (e.g., modify) the data packets being transferred. However, in tag pollution attacks, the adversary pollutes the tags attached to the packets to prevent the destination nodes from decoding correctly, which results in reduced efficiency of the network [15], [28], [29]. Furthermore, both types of pollution attacks can be launched by either an external adversary or an internal compromised node (i.e., byzantine modification attacks).…”

“…The external adversary tries to inject corrupted packets into the network in order to corrupt other coded packets. However, an internal compromised node aims to pollute the transmitted packets by modifying them and thus compromising their integrity [15], [28], [29].…”

“…Deploying NC techniques also improve the energy efficiency of the network since it reduces the number of transmissions required for communications. Furthermore, NC also provides some inbuilt resistance to wiretapping and eavesdropping [14], [15]. However, network coding suffers from attacks [15], especially pollution attacks.…”

On Security Against Pollution Attacks in Network Coding Enabled 5G Networks

“…Some of these challenges like pollution attacks are extremely severe in network coding scenario compared to normal switching networks since the packets in transition are being coded at intermediate nodes. In this section, we analyse some commonly known security challenges from the perspective of a network coded environment summerizing some of the existing works on the security of network coding [19]- [21] and also discuss the pollution attack as a special case of security challenges.…”

“…This paper analyses the security challenges of network coded cooperation for mobile small cells with emphasis on pollution attacks. Even though there have been some interesting surveys on the security of network coding implementations [19]- [21], an extensive study focused on pollution attacks and countermeasures on the background of upcoming 5G and beyond network requirements is still valid. This paper focuses on different types of pollution attacks in the network coding environment and discusses some of the major countermeasures against pollution attacks in the literature, in detail with comparisons.…”