Short signature scheme for multi-source network coding

It has been proven that network coding can provide significant benefits to networks. However, network coding is very vulnerable to pollution attacks. In recent years, many schemes have been designed to defend against these attacks, but as far as we know almost all of them are inapplicable for multi-source network coding system. This paper proposed a novel homomorphic signature scheme based on bilinear pairings to stand against pollution attacks for multi-source network coding, which has a broader application background than single-source network coding. Our signatures are publicly verifiable and the public keys are independent of the files so that our scheme can be used to authenticate multiple files without having to update public keys. The signature length of our proposed scheme is as short as the shortest signatures of a single-source network coding. The verification speed of our scheme is faster than those signature schemes based on elliptic curves in the single-source network.