Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks for Secure Communication

Abstract

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) are gaining increasing interest from researchers due to their promising applications in areas like oil spill monitoring, maritime surveillance, deep-sea archaeology, and marine environment monitoring. With approximately 70% of the Earth's surface covered by water, accessing valuable data from the seafloor is challenging without the aid of specialized technology. Sensor nodes are used in UWSNs to monitor the underwater environment. Once data is collected, it is sent to a sink node, which forwards it to a base station for additional processing. However, sensor node deployment in UWSNs is challenging due to the harsh underwater circumstances, and issues like high energy consumption and restricted communication range make data routing more complicated. UASNs are vulnerable to attacks from malicious nodes, including wormhole, black hole, and Sybil attacks. Lightweight cryptography, which focuses on algorithms that consume less memory, processing power, and energy, is ideal for resource-constrained devices like smartphones, sensors, and IoT devices. One such method that has been used is the Hénon map, a chaotic system, which is particularly useful for text and image encryption. It offers a balance between security and resource efficiency by generating random sequences that drive encryption techniques on devices with limited processing power.