With the growing use of underwater acoustic communications (UWAC) for both industrial and military operations, there is a need to ensure communication security. A particular challenge is represented by underwater acoustic networks (UWANs), which are often left unattended over long periods of time. Currently, due to the physical and performance limitations, the UWAC packets rarely include encryption, leaving the UWAN exposed to external attacks faking legitimate messages. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for message authentication in a UWAN setting. We begin by observing that, due to the strong spatial dependency of the underwater acoustic channel, an attacker can attempt to mimic the channel associated with the legitimate transmitter only for a small set of receivers, typically just for a single one. Taking this into account, our scheme relies on trusted nodes that independently help a sink node in the authentication process. For each incoming packet, the sink fuses beliefs evaluated by the trusted nodes to reach an authentication decision. These beliefs are based on the estimated statistics of the channel parameters, which are chosen to be the most sensitive to the transmitter-receiver displacement. Our simulation results show accurate identification of an attacker’s packet. We also report results from a sea experiment demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.
Comprehensive reviews of security approaches for underwater networks are provided in @cite_1 @cite_39 , which discuss approaches for anti-jamming, privacy securing, and covertness. As this paper focuses on authentication, in this section we consider only authentication approaches. @cite_25 , an end-to-end authentication scheme has been proposed using the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA). Secret keys can also be used for authentication, and in this respect a robust secret key generation scheme is proposed in @cite_30 . The survey in @cite_28 covers several forms of cooperation and their application to underwater networks. Game theory is advocated as a means to foster cooperation among the nodes. In a security context, this concept is applied to motivate nodes to behave cooperatively, and to improve the effectiveness of end-to-end authentication schemes, which are seen as an important aspect of future underwater network developments @cite_32 .
@cite_30 @cite_28 @cite_1 @cite_32 @cite_39 @cite_25
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Underwater acoustic communications have found applications in many fields with great developments. Thus, the demand for security of such communications is rapidly growing. Two parties in the communication, after authentication, generally use a secure symmetric key to encrypt all the data they transmit. Thus, an efficient key generation algorithm is in urgent need to guarding the privacy of the communication data. This paper presents a novel key generation system which is easy to be implemented, efficient in computation and communication, and robust to the spatio-temporal variable ocean environments. Unlike those conventional solutions, by exploiting reciprocity, deep fades, randomness extractor and robust secure fuzzy information reconciliators, which is first introduced by us in this paper, channel characteristics are used to generate the key in our solution. Exploring and monitoring the underwater world using underwater sensors is drawing a lot of attention these days. In this field cooperation between acoustic sensor nodes has been a critical problem due to the challenging features such as acoustic channel failure (sound signal), long propagation delay of acoustic signal, limited bandwidth and loss of connectivity. There are several proposed methods to improve cooperation between the nodes by incorporating information game theory in the node’s cooperation. However, there is a need to classify the existing works and demonstrate their performance in addressing the cooperation issue. In this paper, we have conducted a review to investigate various factors affecting cooperation in underwater acoustic sensor networks. We study various cooperation techniques used for underwater acoustic sensor networks from different perspectives, with a concentration on communication reliability, energy consumption, and security and present a taxonomy for underwater cooperation. Moreover, we further review how the game theory can be applied to make the nodes cooperate with each other. We further analyze different cooperative game methods, where their performance on different metrics is compared. Finally, open issues and future research direction in underwater acoustic sensor networks are highlighted. UASNs are widely used in many applications, and many studies have been conducted. However, most current research projects have not taken network security into consideration, despite the fact that a UASN is typically vulnerable to malicious attacks due to the unique characteristics of an underwater acoustic communication channel (e.g., low communication bandwidth, long propagation delays, and high bit error rates). In addition, the significant differences between UASNs and terrestrial wireless sensor networks entail the urgent and rapid development of secure communication mechanisms for underwater sensor nodes. For the above mentioned reasons, this article aims to present a somewhat comprehensive survey of the emerging topics arising from secure communications in UASNs, which naturally lead to a great number of open research issues outlined afterward. Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) are often used for environmental and industrial sensing in undersea ocean space, therefore, these networks are also named underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). Underwater sensor networks are different from other sensor networks due to the acoustic channel used in their physical layer, thus we should discuss about the specific features of these underwater networks such as acoustic channel modeling and protocol design for different layers of open system interconnection (OSI) model. Each node of these networks as a sensor needs to exchange data with other nodes; however, complexity of the acoustic channel makes some challenges in practice, especially when we are designing the network protocols. Therefore based on the mentioned cases, we are going to review general issues of the design of an UASN in this paper. In this regard, we firstly describe the network architecture for a typical 3D UASN, then we review the characteristics of the acoustic channel and the corresponding challenges of it and finally, we discuss about the different layers e.g. MAC protocols, routing protocols, and signal processing for the application layer of UASNs. Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs) are widely used in various applications such as climate change monitoring, pollution control and tracking, tactical surveillance and offshore exploration. However, limited consideration is given to the security of such networks, despite the fact that the unique characteristics of UANs make these networks vulnerable to various malicious attacks. In this paper, we address future aspects of how to improve security in UANs. We start by reviewing and discussing the state-of-the-art security threats for underwater networks along with their existing solutions. We then identify the open research issues and challenges in the design of secure protocols for communication in UANs. We propose innovative approaches based on node cooperation, cross-layering, software-defined cognitive networking and context-aware communication in order to effectively provision new or strengthen existing security frameworks in UANs. By using these approaches, we address the problem of detecting malicious behaviours and rogue nodes in order to address the major security issues in UANs. We also investigate the use of a covert channel based detection mechanism which needs to be considered when monitoring or deploying UANs at sea. We believe that the issues raised and future possible solution approaches proposed in this paper will greatly help the researchers contributing towards fortifying security in an inherently in-secure UAN. Under-Water Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are a particular class of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in which sensors are located, as the name suggests, underwater. Applications of UWSNs range from oceanographic data collection to disaster prevention. UWSNs are vulnerable to attacks and because of their idiosyncrasies, security solutions for ground WSNs might not be applicable underwater. As a result, there is a need for mechanisms exclusively tailored to underwater environments. In this work we address the problem of authentication in UWSNs. We evaluate energy costs for different digital signature schemes for end-to-end authentication and discuss the tradeoffs involved in a number of scenarios. Our results show that schemes that perform well in ground WSN do not necessarily do well in UWSNs; and shed light on characteristics of a digital signature scheme that make them particularly suited to underwater networks.