Quantum-Resistant Key Management for Underwater Acoustic Multicast Communication

Communication in an underwater environment presents many challenges, due to its unique characteristics of throughput, delay, and error rates. The acoustic channels commonly used for underwater communication have inherent broadcast characteristics and require non-trivial solutions to achieve secure and authenticated communications. The complexity of security challenges is further increased by the ongoing transition to quantum-resistant cryptography. Our paper discusses post-quantum cryptographic solutions for underwater broadcast communication scenarios. Specifically, we present and analyze solutions for sender authentication and key management based on private key cryptography and discuss perfect forward secrecy of communication keys, taking into consideration the constraints of the underwater environment.