Covert and Secure Underwater Acoustic Communication using Merkle Hash Tree and Dolphin Whistle

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Abstract

The unique characteristics of the Underwater Acoustic Communication (UWAC) channel cause the UWAC systems to be very vulnerable to the malicious attacks. So, the bionic-based UWAC has been used due to its good covert performance, and its suitable frequency and correlation properties. It may not be covert in all the underwater environments, or an adversary can detect the message anyway. Therefore, this paper aims at proposing an improved Merkle hash tree based secure scheme that can resist the current possible underwater attacks, i.e., the replay attack, the fabricated message attack, the message altering attack, and the analyst attack. The security analysis indicates that the proposed scheme is resilient to the mentioned attacks. Also, the performance evaluations show that the proposed scheme is proportional to the UWAC limitations due to its efficiency in terms of energy consumption, communication overhead, and computation cost.

Keywords


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  • Receive Date: 22 July 2017
  • Revise Date: 20 February 2019
  • Accept Date: 19 September 2018
  • Publish Date: 23 July 2018