TY - GEN TI - Cooperative Authentication in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks AU - Diamant, Roee AU - Casari, Paolo AU - Tomasin, Stefano PY - 2019 PB - IEEE LA - eng KW - Underwater acoustic communications KW - Underwater acoustic communication networks KW - channel-based security KW - cooperative security KW - authentication KW - sea experiment AB - With the growing use of underwater acoustic communications (UWAC) for both industrial and military operations, there is a need to ensure communication security. A particular challenge is represented by underwater acoustic networks (UWANs), which are often left unattended over long periods of time. Currently, due to physical and performance limitations, UWAC packets rarely include encryption, leaving the UWAN exposed to external attacks faking legitimate messages. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for message authentication in a UWAN setting. We begin by observing that, due to the strong spatial dependency of the underwater acoustic channel, an attacker can attempt to mimic the channel associated with the legitimate transmitter only for a small set of receivers, typically just for a single one. Taking this into account, our scheme relies on trusted nodes that independently help a sink node in the authentication process. For each incoming packet, the sink fuses beliefs evaluated by the trusted nodes to reach an authentication decision. These beliefs are based on estimated statistical channel parameters, chosen to be the most sensitive to the transmitter-receiver displacement. Our simulation results show accurate identification of an attacker's packet. We also report results from a sea experiment demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. ; pub UR - https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12761/651 DO - 10.1109/TWC.2018.2886896 UR - https://www.pollux-fid.de/r/base-ftimdeanetinst:oai:dspace.networks.imdea.org:20.500.12761/651 H1 - Pollux (Fachinformationsdienst Politikwissenschaft) ER -