An Unconditionally Secure Authentication Code For Multi-Source Network Coding

Since the network coding theory was proposed, it has been widely discussed and applied for the advantages of improving throughput, increasing reliability. However, network coding is vulnerable to pollution attacks. Nowadays, as the rapid development of technology, security is of great importance. For network coding, to achieve the goal of maximization of the network resources utilization, it also needs to guarantee the messages transmission and forwarding securely. To the research of secure network coding, most schemes are based on the situation of single source node, namely there is only one source node. While, as it known to all, the condition of multi-source nodes is more widespread in actual network. So it is very valuable and meaningful to study the multi-source network coding.This paper proposed a novel unconditionally secure authentication code in multi-source network coding(USAC-mulsNC), with the difference of previous secure network coding schemes that based on mathematics problems of computational hypothesis, our scheme relies on theoretic strength, in other words, it is robust against an attacker that has unlimited computational resources, namely, it is unconditionally secure; besides, the scheme is appropriate for the situation of multi-source network coding. It can make a conclusion that the method is robust against attacks either from outsiders or coalition of k-1 insiders by the analysis of efficiency and security. In multi-source network coding, using this authentication code, intermediate nodes can verify the integrity and origin of the messages received without having to decode, and detect and discard the messages that fail the verification, by this way, the pollution attacks are avoided, so as to ensure secure network coding.The innovation of this paper is in the following three aspects:(1)Proposed a novel unconditionally secure authentication code, and the code can be used in the situation of multi-source network coding, and it can guarantee the integrity and authenticity of the messages in network coding procedure.(2)In our paper, we make an analysis about the efficiency and security of the scheme, we know that it is robust against attacks either from outsiders or insiders, besides, it can resist pollution attacks, and achieve the goal of messages transmission and forwarding securely. (3) In this paper we make a comparative analysis between our scheme and other secure authentication schemes, we can see that our method not only can be used in multi-source network coding situation, but also it is immune to the attacks that have unlimited computational resources, in other words, it can keep out savage attack.