Signatures for Content Distribution with Network Coding

Recent research has shown that network coding can be used in content distribution systems to improve the speed of downloads and the robustness of the systems. However, such systems are very vulnerable to attacks by malicious nodes, and we need to have a signature scheme that allows nodes to check the validity of a packet without decoding. In this paper, we propose such a signature scheme for network coding. Our scheme makes use of the linearity property of the packets in a coded system, and allows nodes to check the integrity of the packets received easily. We show that the proposed scheme is secure, and its overhead is negligible for large files.