Flooding attacks against network coding and countermeasures

Network coding has attracted the attention of many researchers in security and cryptography. While most of the works have been dedicated to the protection of messages carrying information, nothing has been done to protect the acknowledgment messages needed in network coding. These flooding attacks are critical in resource constraint networks such as wireless sensor networks. An adversary can easily create congestion in the network and exhaust all the resources available. The degradation of the QoS (delay, energy) goes beyond the capabilities of cryptographic solutions. We investigate the security capabilities of multipath acknowledgment. © 2011 IEEE.