Secure Communication with Network Coding

In this paper, we consider the problem of secure communication over wiretap multicast networks. Noticing that network coding renders the intermediate nodes to mix information from different data flows, we propose a secure communication scheme based on cryptographic means and network coding. Specifically, we employ a confidential cryptosystem to encrypt the source message packets, then treat the secret key as a message packet and mix the key with the obtained cryptograms. Furthermore, we can prove that, under suitable conditions, the wiretapper is unable to gain the secret key. Meanwhile, the confidential cryptosystem prohibits the wiretapper from extracting meaningful information from the obtained cryptograms. Our scheme doesn’t need a private channel to transmit the secret key and enables the utilization of network capacity to reach 1 n n.