Secure network coding: Dependency of efficiency on network topology

Network Coding is a new possibility to transmit data through a network. By combining different packets instead of simply forwarding, network coding offers the opportunity to reach the Min-Cut/Max-Flow capacity in multicast data transmissions. However, the basic schemes are vulnerable to so-called pollution attacks, where an attacker can jam large parts of the transmission by infiltrating only one bogus message. In the literature we found several approaches which aim at handling this kind of attack with different amounts of overhead. Though, the cost for a specific secure network coding scheme highly depends on the underlying network. The goal of this paper is on the one hand to describe which network parameters influence the efficiency of a certain scheme and on the other hand to provide concrete suggestions for selecting the most efficient secure network coding scheme considering a given network. We will illustrate that there does not exist “the best” secure network scheme concerning efficiency, but all selected schemes are more or less suited under certain network topologies.