Replay-Attack Countermeasures for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are considered to be one of the most important technologies of the 21st century. While a single sensor node may have limited computation and communication capabilities, putting a large number of them together leads to the creation of ad hoc networks that can be used in reliable data acquisition and sensing. As a result, WSNs have been used in numerous applications in industry, health monitoring, environmental monitoring, and other related fields. However, the unprotected nature of WSNs makes them prone to malicious attacks. One such attack is the replay attack, in which an attacker captures and replays packets traveling in the network. As sensor nodes only have limited energy resources, this attack can have a serious impact on useful network functionality: it can dissipate time and network resources, causing degradation to the sensor network quality, security, and reliability. In this work, the effects of Bloom filtering and other technologies to counter this attack is studied. The use of Bloom filters can help identify the legitimacy of a packet: sensor nodes will be able to distinguish between legitimate and replayed packets along a path, thus improving a node’s decision as to whether it should transmit or discard the received packet. The potential utilization of signatures is also explored as a useful addition to this approach. Findings are coupled with extensive results regarding energy used, packet count, and throughput using Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) as the underlying routing protocol. Finally, the possibility of tracing and identifying the source of the attack is considered by employing appropriate trace-back mechanisms.

2015 International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), 2015

Underwater sensor networks (UWSN) provide a promising solution for several aquatic applications. Mobile UWSNs are vulnerable to various threats because of their harsh environment, acoustic communication channel, bandwidth limitation, high propagation delay, multipath effect, and mobility. Therefore, appropriate security mechanisms should be included in networking services, such as localization, to facilitate time critical applications. In this paper, we discuss various Denial-of-Service attacks in mobile UWSNs. We simulated a flooding attack and an out-of-coverage problem caused by mobility by using Aqua-Sim, and analyzed their impact on UWSN performance. In addition, we surveyed UWSN localization techniques and secure localization schemes of terrestrial wireless sensor networks (WSN). Simulation experiments were conducted to analyze the performance variation between mobile UWSNs and mobile WSNs. The study concluded that the variation in the network performance of mobile UWSNs varies from that of WSNs. Therefore, the security mechanisms proposed for terrestrial WSNs are unsuitable for UWSNs.

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 ...

ICC 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 2020

This paper investigates the impact of authentication on effective capacity (EC) of an underwater acoustic (UWA) channel. Specifically, the UWA channel is under impersonation attack by a malicious node (Eve) present in the close vicinity of the legitimate node pair (Alice and Bob); Eve tries to inject its malicious data into the system by making Bob believe that she is indeed Alice. To thwart the impersonation attack by Eve, Bob utilizes the distance of the transmit node as the feature/fingerprint to carry out feature-based authentication at the physical layer. Due to authentication at Bob, due to lack of channel knowledge at the transmit node (Alice or Eve), and due to the threshold-based decoding error model, the relevant dynamics of the considered system could be modelled by a Markov chain (MC). Thus, we compute the state-transition probabilities of the MC, and the moment generating function for the service process corresponding to each state. This enables us to derive a closed-form expression of the EC in terms of authentication parameters. Furthermore, we compute the optimal transmission rate (at Alice) through gradient-descent (GD) technique and artificial neural network (ANN) method. Simulation results show that the EC decreases under severe authentication constraints (i.e., more false alarms and more transmissions by Eve). Simulation results also reveal that the (optimal transmission rate) performance of the ANN technique is quite close to that of the GD method.

Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 2016

The security and privacy of underwater acoustic sensor networks has received extensive attention recently due to the proliferation of underwater activities. This paper proposes an analytical model to investigate the eavesdropping attacks in underwater acoustic sensor networks. Our analytical framework considers the impacts of various underwater acoustic channel conditions (such as the acoustic signal frequency, spreading factor and wind speed) and different hydrophones (isotropic hydrophones and array hydrophones) in terms of network nodes and eavesdroppers. We also conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the effectiveness and the accuracy of our proposed model. Empirical results show that our proposed model is quite accurate. In addition, our results also imply that the eavesdropping probability heavily depends on both the underwater acoustic channel conditions and the features of hydrophones.

Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN) have gained more attention from researchers in recent years due to their advancement in marine monitoring, deployment of various applications, and ocean surveillance. The UWSN is an attractive field for both researchers and the industrial side. Due to the harsh underwater environment, own capabilities, and open acoustic channel, it is also vulnerable to malicious attacks and threats. Attackers can easily take advantage of these characteristics to steal the data between the source and destination. Many review articles are addressed some of the security attacks and taxonomy of the Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks. In this study, we have briefly addressed the taxonomy of the UWSNs from the most recent research articles related to the well-known research databases. This paper also discussed the security threats on each layer of the Underwater Wireless sensor networks. This study will help the researchers design the routing protocols to cover...

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.

UWSN are attracting researchers in terrestrial radio-based sensor network development in order to monitor the events such as contaminants, marine life and intruders via acoustic modems and report it in a realtime medium through radio or wireless communication. In this, changes in ocean currents, weak reliability and wormhole attack are the major challenges in underwater sensor network. Although Multipath communication coupled by Forward Error Correction and localization for wormhole attack provides high performance for USNs, still there is false alarms and low probability of successful recovery of received packets in destination node, which in turn becomes a major problems for reliability and accuracy. In this paper Hamming code based segment combination and localization based wormhole attack has been proposed to prevent and helps to attain secure and efficient way of communication in acoustic modems in UWSN's. -152 © IAEME 146 navigation and report to the nearby data analytics centre. UWSN face variety of challenges as the sensor have deep difference between the underwater and the terrestrial radio propagation environment and the major reason is whether the terrestrial radio propagation can be reused for the underwater communication.

In this paper we introduce R-CARP, a reputation based channel aware routing protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs). While many routing protocols have been proposed for UASNs, solutions to secure routing protocols from attacks such as sinkhole attack and selective forwarding are still overlooked. These routing attacks can dramatically disrupt network performance, especially in some application scenarios such as homeland security and critical infrastructure monitoring, where a high reliability on message delivery is required. Designing secure and reliable protocols for UASNs is particularly challenging due to acoustic modems unique characteristics such as low bandwidth and bit rate, high propagation delays and high energy consumption when in transmit mode. The aim of this work is therefore to propose R-CARP, a secure and reliable routing protocol tailored to such communication constrained environment. R-CARP is an improved version of CARP, the channel aware routing protocol presented in [5], enriched with a reputation based mechanism to contrast malicious node behavior. To secure R-CARP we employ BLS, a short digital signature algorithm, exploiting its aggregation property to reduce the additional communication overhead. By means of simulation based performance evaluation, we show that, under attack, R-CARP is effective at bypassing malicious nodes and outperforms CARP in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR) and energy per bit (EPB) by a factor of up to 2, at the cost of a slight increment in terms of latency.

Ensuring communications security in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is very vital because the security protocols therein, should be devised to work at the link layer. Theoretically, any link layer security protocol must support three vital security attributes viz. Confidentiality, Message Integrity and Replay protection. However, in order to ensure lesser overhead, replay protection is often not incorporated as part of the link layer security framework. We argue here, that it is essential to implement replay protection at the link layer only and devise a simple scheme to do so. We first survey the common approaches to ensuring replay protection in conventional networks. We also implement the conventional algorithms for replay protection using the link layer framework for WSNs viz. TinySec as the underlying platform. Subsequently analyzing their limitations, we propose a novel Bloom-filter based replay protection algorithm for unicast communications. We show that our algorithm is bet...