Securing network coding against pollution attacks in P2P converged ubiquitous networks

Network coding has emerged as a promising approach for peer-to-peer converged ubiquitous networks to increase network capacity and solve the block reconciliation problem. However, peer-to-peer systems with network coding suffer a severe security threat, known as pollution attack, in which malicious peers inject corrupted packets into the information flow. Previous solutions are either computationally expensive or too ineffective to limit pollution attacks with arbitrary collusion among malicious peers. In this paper, we propose time keys, an efficient security scheme which allows participating peers to efficiently detect corrupted packets by using time and space properties of network coding. Our work is an innovative security solution to frustrate pollution attacks with collusion based on time and space properties of network coding. In addition, time keys scheme provides an efficient packet verification without requiring the existence of any extra secure channels. We also present security analysis and simulations of our scheme, and results demonstrate the practicality and efficiency of time keys scheme.