Lightweight Route Propagation Delays Based Attack Detection for Underwater Acoustic Networks

A physical-layer security approach for generating sequences of random bits (keys) between two Underwater Acoustic Network (UWAN) devices (Alice and Bob); the key must be kept hidden from a non-UWAN passive Eavesdropper (Eve). A single physical device may launch a coordinated attack on the network or swap identities to undermine the detection process, resulting in a lack of responsibility in the network. In dynamic networks with burst traffic, when lengthy periods of calm are anticipated between data bursts, this multicast state maintenance adds a significant amount of communication, processing, and memory overhead that is not beneficial to the application. Thus, we created a stateless receiver-based multicast protocol that merely uses a list of multicast members' (e.g., sinks’) addresses encoded in packet headers to allow receivers to choose the optimal method to transmit multicast data. Our solution is based on measuring the propagation delay of the underwater acoustic channel over numerous UWAN hops: this exploits the unpredictability in the UWAN architecture and uses the slow sound propagation in water to its advantage against eavesdropping