Mitigating Blackhole attack of Underwater Sensor Networks

Abstract

Underwater wireless sensor network(UWSN) is an emerging technology for exploring and research inside the ocean. Since it is somehow similar to the normal wireless network, which uses radio signals for communication purposes, while UWSN uses acoustic for communication between nodes inside the ocean and sink nodes. Due to unattended areas and the vulnerability of acoustic medium, UWNS are more prone to various malicious attacks like Sybil attack, Black-hole attack, Wormhole attack, etc. This paper analyzes blackhole attacks in UWSN and proposes an algorithm to mitigate blackhole attacks by forming clusters of nodes and selecting coordinator nodes from each cluster to identify the presence of blackholes in its cluster. We used public-key cryptography and the challenge-response method to authenticate and verify nodes. © 2021 IEEE.