An identity-based digital signature scheme to detect pollution attacks in intra-session network coding

Network coding is an approach to increase throughput by combining received packets in intermediate nodes. Despite its benefits, this approach is vulnerable to “Pollution Attacks”, in which an attacker corrupts a packet, this corrupted packet is encoded with other packets and as a result, pollution disseminates through downstream nodes and prevent receivers from decoding the original file. Signature schemes are presented to detect the existence of pollution attacks in the presence of one sender. Most existing signature schemes, proposed to detect pollution attacks, are based on public key infrastructure (PKI). In this paper, we propose an “Identity-based Digital Signature Scheme” to detect pollution attacks in intra-session network coding. The proposed scheme, does not need issuing a third-party query to certificate authority (CA). Moreover, it eliminates the key escrow problem, an important constraint in Identity-based digital signatures. Also, the sender has the ability to update its keys without changing its identity whenever necessary.