Network Codes Resilient to Jamming and Eavesdropping

We consider the problem of communicating information over a network secretly and reliably in the presence of a hidden adversary who can eavesdrop and inject malicious errors. We provide polynomial-time, rate-optimal distributed network codes for this scenario, improving on the rates achievable in previous work. Our main contribution shows that as long as the sum of the adversary's jamming rate Zo and his eavesdropping rate Zi is less than the network capacity C, (i.e., Zo+Zi<C), our codes can communicate (with vanishingly small error probability) a single bit correctly and without leaking any information to the adversary. We then use this to design codes that allow communication at the optimal source rate of C-Zo-Zi, while keeping the communicated message secret from the adversary. Interior nodes are oblivious to the presence of adversaries and perform random linear network coding; only the source and destination need to be tweaked. In proving our results we correct an error in prior work by a subset of the authors in this work.Comment: 6 pages, to appear at IEEE NetCod 201

Resilient Network Coding in the Presence of Byzantine Adversaries

Network coding substantially increases network throughput. But since it involves mixing of information inside the network, a single corrupted packet generated by a malicious node can end up contaminating all the information reaching a destination, preventing decoding. This paper introduces distributed polynomial-time rate-optimal network codes that work in the presence of Byzantine nodes. We present algorithms that target adversaries with different attacking capabilities. When the adversary can eavesdrop on all links and jam zO links, our first algorithm achieves a rate of C - 2zO, where C is the network capacity. In contrast, when the adversary has limited eavesdropping capabilities, we provide algorithms that achieve the higher rate of C - zO. Our algorithms attain the optimal rate given the strength of the adversary. They are information-theoretically secure. They operate in a distributed manner, assume no knowledge of the topology, and can be designed and implemented in polynomial time. Furthermore, only the source and destination need to be modified; nonmalicious nodes inside the network are oblivious to the presence of adversaries and implement a classical distributed network code. Finally, our algorithms work over wired and wireless networks

A Computational Perspective on Network Coding

From the perspectives of graph theory and combinatorics theory we obtain some new upper bounds on the number of encoding nodes, which can characterize the coding complexity of the network coding, both in feasible acyclic and cyclic multicast networks. In contrast to previous work, during our analysis we first investigate the simple multicast network with source rate h=2, and then h≥2. We find that for feasible acyclic multicast networks our upper bound is exactly the lower bound given by M. Langberg et al. in 2006. So the gap between their lower and upper bounds for feasible acyclic multicast networks does not exist. Based on the new upper bound, we improve the computational complexity given by M. Langberg et al. in 2009. Moreover, these results further support the feasibility of signatures for network coding

Identifying malicious nodes in network-coding-based peer-to-peer streaming networks

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