This document discusses securing underwater wireless communication networks. It begins with an introduction to underwater wireless sensor networks and their components. It then outlines several common attacks on such networks like jamming, wormholes, and selective forwarding. It describes countermeasures to these attacks. The document also discusses important security requirements for underwater networks like authentication, confidentiality, and integrity. It proposes mechanisms for secure time synchronization, localization, and routing to enhance security. In conclusion, it maintains that a system with these secure elements can overcome common attacks while minimizing communication costs and preserving sensor energy.

1. SECURING UNDERWATER
WIRELESS
COMMUNICATION
NISHA MENON K
ROLL NO: 16
M-TECH
COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING
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2. OUTLINE
• Introduction
• Underwater Wireless Communication Network
• Attacks and counter measures
• Security requirements
• Proposed security mechanisms
• Conclusion
• Reference
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3. Introduction
(UWCNs) are constituted by sensors , sink and autonomous
underwater vehicles (AUVs) that interact to perform specific
applications such as underwater monitoring.
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4. Sensor nodes
also known as motes or simply
nodes are small and energy constrained devices that
have the ability of sensing the surrounding
environment.
Sink also known as base station, is a more powerful
node that behaves as an interface between the sensor
nodes and the clients.
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
(AUVs) that interact to perform specific applications
such as underwater monitoring
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5. Underwater Wireless
Communication System
 Radio waves do not propagate well underwater due to the high
energy absorption of water
 Therefore, underwater communications are based on acoustic
links characterized by large propagation delays. The propagation
speed of acoustic signals in water (typically 1500 m/s)
 Acoustic channels have low bandwidth . As a result, the bit error
rates of acoustic links are often high, and losses of connectivity arise
 It cannot rely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) because it uses
radar waves in the 1.5 GHz band that do not propagate in water.
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6. Underwater Wireless
Communication System
 Underwater wireless communication networks are particularly
vulnerable to malicious attacks due to the high bit error rates, large
and variable propagation delays, and low bandwidth of acoustic
channels.
 Several methods
are proposed to secure Underwater Wireless
Communication Networks. Three schemes namely, secure time
synchronization, localization, and routing in UWCNs
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7. Wormhole
attack
Sinkhole
Attack
Jamming
Attacks
Hello Flood
attack
Sybil attack
Acknowled
gement
spoofing
Selective
Forwarding
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8. Jamming
Method of Attack
• The transmission of data packets continuously
so that the wireless channel is completely
blocked.
Countermeasures
• Spread spectrum techniques
• Sensors can switch to sleep mode
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9. Wormhole Attack
Method of attack
• False neighborhood relationships are
created
• The adversary can delay or drop
packets sent through the wormhole.
Countermeasures
• Dis-VoW
• Estimating the direction of arrival
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10. Selective Forwarding
Method of Attack
• Malicious nodes drop certain messages instead
of forwarding them to hinder routing.
Countermeasures
• Multipath routing
• Authentication
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11. Sinkhole Attack
Method of Attack
• A malicious node attempts to attract traffic from
a particular area towards it by announcing that
it is a high quality route.
Countermeasures
• Geographical routing
• Authentication of nodes exchanging routing
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12. Helloflood Attack
Method of Attack
• A node receiving a HELLO packet from a malicious
node may interpret that the adversary is a neighbor.
Countermeasures
• Bidirectional link verification
• Authentication is a possible defense
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13. Acknowledgement
Spoofing
Method of Attack
• A malicious node overhearing packets sent to
neighbor nodes use the information to spoof
acknowledgements.
Countermeasures
• Encryption of all packets sent through the
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14. Sybil Attack
Method of attack
• Sybil attack is defined as a malicious
node illegitimately taking on multiple
identities
• Attacker with multiple identities
pretend to be in many places at once.
Countermeasures
• Authentication
• Position verification
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15. Security Requirements
Authentication
Proof that data was sent by a legitimate user
Confidentiality
Information is not accessible to unauthorized parties
Integrity
Information is not altered
Availability
Data should be available when needed by an authorized user
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16. Proposed Security
Mechanism
Secure under
water
communication
Secure time
synchronization
Secure
localization
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Secure routing
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17. Secure time
Synchronization
Why is Time Synchronization Important?
 Location and proximity of siblings
 Intranetwork coordination
 Maintain ordering of messages
 Use of TDMA
 Energy efficiency
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18. Secure time
Synchronization
Multilateration algorithm
Phase 1
Phase 2
• Assume that a set of anchor nodes on ocean surface already know
their location and time without error
• A group of nearby sensors receives synchronization packets from at
least 5 anchor nodes
• The sensors learn their time difference between themselves and
anchor nodes by comparing the synchronization packets
• These nodes subsequently becomes the next anchor nodes.
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19. Secure Localization
Why is Localization important?
 Vulnerability of WSN
What an attacker can potentially do?
GOAL: Make the node think it is
somewhere different from actual
location
Wormhole attack
Jamming
As a result…
Wrong results: wrong decisions
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20. Secure Localization
 Goal: To guarantee correctness despite of the presence of
intruders
 Localization is the process for each sensor node to locate its
positions in the network.
 Localization algorithms developed for terrestrial sensor networks
are either based on the signal strength or the time-of-arrival (TOA)
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21. Secure Localization
• Range-based
– Use exact measurements (point-to-point distance
estimate (range) or angle estimates)
– More expensive
– Scalable Localization with Mobility Prediction (SLMP)
• Range-free
– Cost-effective alternative to range-based solutions
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22. Secure Routing
 Routing is specially challenging in UWCNs due to
the large propagation delays, low
bandwidth, difficulty of battery refills of
underwater sensors, and dynamic topologies.
 A secure routing rejects routing paths containing
malicious nodes.
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23. Secure Routing
 Proactive protocols ( DSDV)
 Reactive protocols (AODV)
 Focused Beam Routing Protocol
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24. Advantages
 It avoids data spoofing.
 It avoids privacy leakage.
 Minimize communication and computational cost.
 Maximizes the battery power by preserving the power of
Underwater sensors
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25. Conclusion
 Wireless technology plays a vital role in many application areas that
were not possible in the past. Wireless Underwater communication is
one of them.
 The main attacks related to UWCN have been surveyed.
 A system with secure time synchronization, secure localization and
secure routing can overcome these attacks.
 Since the deployment of the proposed system is still in its development
stage, an account of actual implementation has not been provided here.
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26. REFERNCES
[1] “Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks: Research Challenges,” Ad HocNet., vol. 3, no.
3, I. F. Akyildiz, D. Pompili, and T. Melodia, Mar. 2005.
[2] “Visualization of Wormholes in Underwater Sensor Networks: A Distributed
Approach,” Int’l. J. Security Net., vol. 3, no. 1, W. Wang et al., 2008, pp. 10–23.
[3] “A Taxonomy for Denial-of-Service Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks.” chapter in
Handbook of Sensor Networks: Compact Wireless and Wired Sensing Systems, A. D. Wood
and J. A. Stankovic, M. Ilyas and I. Mahgoub, Eds., CRC Press, 2004.
[4] Security and Cooperation in Wireless Networks: Thwarting Malicious and Selfish
Behavior in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Cambridge Univ. Press, L. Buttyán and J.-P.
Hubaux, 2008.
[5] “Wormhole-Resilient Secure Neighbor Discovery in Underwater Acoustic
Networks,” R. Zhang and Y. Zhang, Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2010.
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27. THANK YOU
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