ERSS-RLNC: Efficient and robust secure scheme for random linear network coding

Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) is a promising technology of Network Coding (NC) that has been proved to be both sufficient and efficient. To enable the deployment of RLNC in real networks, this paper first introduces a new efficient and flexible authentication–encryption scheme that is immune to Byzantine and eavesdropping attacks. The proposed scheme achieves simultaneously information confidentiality, packet integrity and source authentication with minimum computational complexity and memory consumption. It also presents a new technique for constructing an integer Global Encoding Matrix (GEM) that satisfies the inversion property in a dynamic manner. In addition, the proposed scheme uses dynamic keys to ensure robustness against attacks. Secondly, an efficient implementation of Binary RLNC, suitable for battery constrained mobile devices with low computational capabilities such as mobile phones and sensors, is defined. The effectiveness of the coding process is proved by modifying the Galois field of calculation from integer (int8, int16) to binary. Not only does this ensure low computational requirements, high throughput and low energy consumption, but also reduces the statistical characteristics of the coding process. The obtained theoretical and experimental results show that the new scheme is secure and efficient compared with many recent works in this field.