Towards Network Coding for Cyber-Physical Systems: Security Challenges and Applications

This survey summarizes the research on the applications and security challenges of network coding in wireless networks and Cyber-Physical Systems. Network coding technique generalizes the store-and-forward routing by mixing the received packets at the intermediate nodes to a single packet before forwarding them. Network coding has received a lot of attention from the community, and researchers has widely studied its application in increasing the throughput and transmissions reliability of networks and cyber-physical systems. Applying network coding can be a challenge to the security of the networks. However, network coding can also provide a natural way to conceal the transmitted data from eavesdroppers. As a result of mixing the received packets at the intermediate nodes, the transmission protocols in network coding are more vulnerable against some attacks, such as pollution and Byzantine attacks. A single polluted packet can easily pollute many packets. Also, because of encoding at the intermediate nodes, the security mechanisms that are proposed for the traditional transmission protocols might not be appropriate for the protocols with network coding. On the other hand, since the transmitted packets are encoded, an eavesdropper cannot get meaningful data by overhearing a single encoded packet, which makes the transmissions more robust against eavesdropping attack. In this survey, in addition to discussing the security challenges in network coding protocols, we explain the applications of network coding in providing security. Our main focus in this paper is on the applications of network coding in providing security.