The data explosion we witness in todayfs digital world reinforces the concerns about security and privacy in networks. Coding-theoretic techniques, such as network coding and erasure coding for distributed storage, have been recently proposed and partially adopted in practice in order to reduce the cost incurred by data growth in networks in terms of bandwidth use, storage capacity, and energy consumption. Unfortunately, using such codes in networks creates novel security vulnerabilities e.g., pollution attacks and eavesdropping, which have not yet been adequately addressed.
But, the distributed nature of networked systems does not only open new venues to attack. It also often imposes information-theoretic limitations on the adversary, making it possible to achieve provable and information-theoretic security without relying on computational assumptions of traditional cryptography. Some such examples include private information retrieval, differential privacy, distributed secret sharing, exposure-resilient and tamper-resilient coding. A growing body of recent literature has been addressing these problems.
This workshop intends to bring together experts in coding theory, network coding, network security and privacy from the electrical engineering and computer science disciplines, along with experts from the industry. The goal is to discuss recent progress and identify open problems in security that arise in networks and distributed systems which could be effectively addressed by coding-theoretic techniques