Authentication of Underwater Assets (original) (raw)

A Survey of Acoustic Underwater Communications and Ways of Mitigating Security Challenges

Underwater Communication Networks (UWCNs) has become in the recent decades, a technology of utmost importance especially in the oil industry, defense industry and search and rescue operations. Underwater communications face some of the most unique challenges, first and foremost is the high attenuation that occurs in an underwater environment along with high bit error rates, large and variable propagation delays, and low bandwidth of acoustic channels. And Because of the aforementioned reasons, underwater communications are also prone to malicious attacks. In this paper, we look at underwater wireless communication and perform a survey of security and robustness for UWCNs and the research challenges for secure communication. Solutions investigated include choosing the best carrier frequency to minimize transmission losses, choosing the best modulation technique and proper design of the receiver.

Towards Physical Layer Cryptography for Underwater Acoustic Networking

2019

Two main approaches for securing a wireless link are symmetric encryption and public key encryption [1]. Both of these are applied to upper layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) stack. Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs) typically have an ad-hoc structure and the use of public keys becomes not practical since there is no infrastructure that supports key management and authentication. Symmetric key strategies involve the distribution of new keys when new nodes join the network in the middle of a mission and this may not be desirable. In addition, if the current key is compromised, and is also used to share the future key, then secure communications is not possible anymore. Following the line of thought in radio communications, we investigate Physical Layer Security (PLS) for UANs. PLS leverages on the uncorrelated nature of multipath over space, and channel reciprocity to independently generate a cryptographic key between two authenticated nodes even if an eavesdropper is ...

Cooperative Authentication in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2019

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 physical and performance limitations, 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 estimated statistical channel parameters, chosen to be the most sensitive to the transmitterreceiver 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.

Underwater Wireless Communication:Its Necessity and Security

2017

Underwater wireless communication systems are especially helpless against malicious assaults because of the high piece blunder rates, variable spread deferrals, and low data transfer capacity of acoustic channels. The one of kind qualities of the submerged acoustic communication channel and the contrasts between underwater sensor networks and their ground-based partners require the improvement of proficient and dependable security components. In this article, a total overview of security for UWCNs is introduced, and the exploration challenges for secure communication in this condition are outlined.

SecFUN: Security Framework for Underwater acoustic sensor Networks

In this paper we introduce SecFUN, a security framework for underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs). Despite the increasing interest on UASNs, solutions to secure protocols from the network layer up to the application layer are still overlooked. The aim of this work is therefore manyfold. We first discuss common threats and countermeasures for UASNs. Then, we select the most effective cryptographic primitives to build our security framework (SecFUN). We show that SecFUN is flexible and configurable with different features and security levels to satisfy UASN deployment security requirements. SecFUN provides data confidentiality, integrity, authentication and non-repudiation by exploiting as building blocks AES in the Galois Counter Mode (GCM) and short digital signature algorithms. As a proof of concept of the proposed approach, we extend the implementation of the Channel-Aware Routing Protocol (CARP) to support the proposed cryptographic primitives. Finally, we run a performance evaluation of our proposed secure version of CARP in terms of the overall energy consumption and latency, employing GCM and the state of the art in short digital signature schemes such as ZSS, BLS and Quartz. Results show that a flexible and full-fledged security solution tailored to meet the requirements of UASNs can be provided at reasonable costs.

Security of Underwater and Air-Water Wireless Communication

2022

We present a first detailed survey that focuses on the security challenges faced by the underwater and air-water (A-W) wireless communication networks (WCNs), as well as the countermeasures proposed to date. Specifically, we provide a detailed literature review of the various kinds of active and passive attacks which hamper the confidentiality, integrity, authentication and availability of both underwater and A-W WCNs. For clarity of exposition, this survey paper is mainly divided into two parts. The first part of the paper is essentially a primer on underwater and A-W WCNs whereby we outline the benefits and drawbacks of the three promising underwater and A-W candidate technologies: radio frequency (RF), acoustic, and optical, along with channel modelling. To this end, we also describe the indirect (relay-aided) and direct mechanisms for the A-W WCNs along with channel modelling. This sets the stage for the second part (and main contribution) of the paper whereby we provide a thoro...

A Secure Communication Suite for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 2012

In this paper we describe a security suite for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks comprising both fixed and mobile nodes. The security suite is composed of a secure routing protocol and a set of cryptographic primitives aimed at protecting the confidentiality and the integrity of underwater communication while taking into account the unique characteristics and constraints of the acoustic channel. By means of experiments and simulations based on real data, we show that the suite is suitable for an underwater networking environment as ...

A Comprehensive Analysis of Security-Based Schemes in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Sustainability

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) are comprised of sensor nodes that are deployed under the water having limited battery power and other limited resources. Applications of UWSNs include monitoring the quality of the water, mine detection, environment monitoring, military surveillance, disaster prediction, and underwater navigation. UWSNs are more vulnerable to security attacks as compared to their counterparts such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The possible attacks in UWSNs can abrupt the operation of entire network. This research work presents the analysis of relevant research done on security-based schemes in UWSNs. The security-based schemes are categorized into five sub-categories. Each technique in each category is analyzed in detail. The major contribution in each security-based scheme along with technique used, possible future research issues and implementation tool are discussed in detail. The open research issues and future trends identified and presented in...

Securing Underwater Acoustic Communications through Analog Network Coding

We propose a new secure underwater acoustic communication scheme designed to let a user (Alice) transmit a confidential message to another user (Bob) in the presence of an eavesdropper (Eve). A typical approach in conventional wireless physical-layer security is to rely on a friendly jammer to jam Eve through artificial noise (AN). Instead, for the first time, we propose a secure underwater communication scheme that relies on cooperative friendly jamming through CDMA-based analog network coding (ANC). The cooperative friendly jammer transmits information using the same spreading code used in the legitimate Alice-Bob link. The information transmitted by the cooperative jammer is known a priori to Bob, but not to Eve. Although the jammer's packet will also interfere at Bob, we show that after jointly estimating the two multipath-affected channels, Bob can suppress the interfering packet and decode Alice's packet, while Eve cannot. We also formulate the problem of joint optimal selection of friendly jammer and power allocation (for Alice and the jammer) that minimize Eve's capability of intercepting the signal while guaranteeing a predefined level of quality of service (QoS) for Bob. The proposed scheme is implemented in a testbed based on Teledyne Benthos Telesonar SM-975 underwater modems and tested extensively in Lake LaSalle at the University at Buffalo. Experiments and simulations demonstrate that, for a given energy budget, the proposed scheme can guarantee much higher bit error rate (BER) at Eve, while creating minimal BER disturbance at Bob, compared to the ANaided approach.