On security against pollution attacks in network coding enabled 5G networks

Future communication networks need to harness the available spectrum more efficiently to cater the requirements of the ever-increasing digital devices. Higher data rate with low latency is a major requirement of future communication networks. Network coding is arising once more as an enabler for satisfying the bandwidth requirements of future multimedia and resource hungry services. However, network coding techniques suffer from security vulnerabilities that will eliminate any bandwidth profits. Specific attacks in network coding like pollution attacks are extremely dangerous due to the nature of encoding and spreading inside the whole network. They deteriorate the bandwidth efficiency and even disrupt proper decoding of any message at the receiving end. Further, in a wireless environment, the authenticity of intermediate nodes is not easy to ensure, making it easier for an attacker to be part of the network. Thus counteracting pollution attacks in network coding becomes very important for practical applications of network coding enabled networks in the future generations of mobile communication. There has been a lot of research interest in this direction resulting in a few interesting approaches for secure network coding. However, most of the schemes fail to meet the expected standards or incur high overheads to the system. Schemes addressing the dense heterogeneous networks efficiently are yet to be proposed. This study surveys the security vulnerabilities of network coding, particularly those imposed by pollution attacks, as well as, the corresponding countermeasures. The survey goes a step further and includes a potential secure implementation of network coding enabled 5G networks, based on cooperating small cells.