Implementation of A Homomorphic MAC Scheme in a Transparent Hardware Appliance for Network Coding

Network coding (NC) can effectively improve data delivery in a noisy network. It allows the nodes to combine multiple packets and deliver them out. The destination can then recover it. However, pollution attacks are the most common threat to NC. As malicious nodes can inject false Ethernet packets into the network to ban the receiver from decoding the packets properly, certain authentication information must be embedded in the packets to enable the receiver to authenticate received packets. In this paper, a new scheme to apply secure Message Authentication Code (MAC) with network coding is proposed. By applying this scheme, malicious packets could be rejected in intermediate nodes without waiting until verified and dropped by the receiving node. This technique is applied with the aid of a separate hardware device with an Altera Cyclone IV FPGA chip to generate the MAC and append it to the original ethernet packets. The proposed scheme can be integrated in the existing running environments without any changes in the network configuration. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated to measure its throughput.