An improved homomorphic message authentication code scheme for RLNC-enabled wireless networks

Network Coding has significantly improved the achievable throughput and robustness compared to traditional store-and-forward transmission paradigm. However, network coding-enabled networks are susceptible to pollution attack where a small number of polluted messages will propagate in recoding and corrupt bunches of legitimate messages. Recently, several light weight Homomorphic Message Authentication Code (HMAC) schemes were proposed for protecting the transmitted data against pollution attacks; however, most of them cannot resist tag pollution attacks. This paper presents an improved scheme, called Dual-HMAC, for Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC)-enabled wireless networks. The proposed scheme makes use of two types of tags (i.e., HMACs) to provide resistance against data pollution attacks and partially tag pollution attacks.