Lightweight integrity for XOR network coding in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In INFOCOM 2009, Yu, Wei, Ramkumar and Guan have proposed the novel mechanism (called Yu's scheme), in which a forwarder can filter polluted messages before spreading the pollution in the XOR network coding systems. In order to perform such filtering, two or more message authentication codes (MACs) are used for this scheme. However, Yu's scheme has a problem that the number of MACs increases at every coding point, since it cannot operate MACs with the XOR network coding. This means that the MAC of Yu's scheme does not have homomorphic property. In this paper, we propose the first symmetric-key-based scheme not only to filter polluted messages but also to operate MACs with the XOR network coding on a forwarder. The XOR network coding of MACs produces improvement which does not increase the number of MACs at a coding point. Our scheme uses the UHFs-based MAC with a homomorphic property to hold homomorphic MAC, and hence it can aggregate MACs in our XOR network coding systems. We emphasize that a forwarder cannot straightforward filter polluted messages even if our scheme uses the UHFs-based MACs. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.