An Effective Privacy-Preserving Data Coding in Peer-To-Peer Network

Abstract

Coding Opportunistically (COPE) is a simple but very effective data coding mechanism in the wireless network.
However, COPE leaves risks for attackers easily getting the private information saved in the packets,
when they move through the network to their destination nodes. Hence, a lightweight cryptographic approach,
namely SCOPE, was proposed to consolidate COPE against the honest-but-curious and malicious
attacks. Honest-but-curious attack serves adversaries who accurately obey the protocol but try to learn as
much private information as possible for their curiosity. Additionally, this kind of attack is not destructive
consequently. However, it may leave the backdoor for the more dangerous attacks carrying catastrophes
to the system. Malicious attack tries to learn not only the private information but also modifies the packet
on harmful purposes. To cope with this issue, in this work, a lightweight cryptographic approach improves
COPE, namely SCOPE, that is defensive to the both attacks. The private information in the COPE packet
are encrypted by Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), and an additional information is inserted into SCOPE
packets served for the authentication process using the lightweight hash Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
(ECDSA). We then prove our new protocol is still guaranteed to be a secure method of data coding,
and to be light to effectively operate in the peer-to-peer wireless network.