On Counteracting Byzantine Attacks in Network Coded Peer-to-Peer Networks

Random linear network coding can be used in peer-to-peer networks to increase the efficiency of content distribution and distributed storage. However, these systems are particularly susceptible to Byzantine attacks. We quantify the impact of Byzantine attacks on the coded system by evaluating the probability that a receiver node fails to correctly recover a file. We show that even for a small probability of attack, the system fails with overwhelming probability. We then propose a novel signature scheme that allows packet-level Byzantine detection. This scheme allows one-hop containment of the contamination, and saves bandwidth by allowing nodes to detect and drop the contaminated packets. We compare the net cost of our signature scheme with various other Byzantine schemes, and show that when the probability of Byzantine attacks is high, our scheme is the most bandwidth efficient.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures, Submitted to IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC) "Mission Critical Networking

Communication Overhead of Network Coding Schemes Secure against Pollution Attacks

Network coding is a promising approach for increasing performance of multicast data transmission and reducing energy costs. Of course, it is essential to consider security aspects to ensure a reliable data transmission. Particularly, pollution attacks may have serious impacts in network coding since a single attacker can jam large parts of the network. Therefore, various approaches have been introduced to secure network coding against this type of attack. However, introducing security increases costs. Even though there are some performance analysis of secure schemes, to our knowledge there are no details whether these schemes are worthwhile to replace routing under the facet of efficiency. Thus, we discuss in this report parameters to assess the efficiency of secure network coding schemes. Using three network graphs, we evaluate parameters focusing on communication overhead for selected schemes. Our results show that there are still benefits in comparison to routing depending on the network topology