Security analysis of a protocol for pollution attack detection

Network coding is a technique for maximizing the use of available bandwidth capacity. This is achieved by having nodes not just forwarding packets but combining several incoming packets into a single outgoing packet for transmission. Unfortunately, network coding is vulnerable to pollution attacks where a single malicious node can disrupt the operation of the complete network. Several protocols to detect pollution attacks have been proposed in the literature. In this paper we describe a new pollution attack detection protocol that extends the existing SpaceMac protocol. This paper describes how we have modeled the protocol in order to carry out a security analysis and presents the results of that analysis.