Mitigating Neighborship Attack In Underwater Sensor Networks

Abstract

Transmission of information through Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks(UWSN) across the ocean is one of the enabling technologies for underwater communication. These advances trigger security concerns of the underlying UWSN. Due to the Sack of predictability of the movement of the nodes in such a system, secure neighbour discovery for successful information exchange is a challenge. A neighborship attack is the one which hinders neighbour discovery amongst the various nodes within the network. The wormhole attack and the Sybil attack being the prominent attacks in this category, lead to various issues if not mitigated. The consequences of these attacks can quickly scale from reduced throughput to loss of confidentiality. Moreover, conventional cryptographic algorithms are not possible to implement in a UWSN due to restrictions on the open acoustic channel and severe underwater conditions. In this paper, we propose a true-neighbour algorithm for mitigating neighborship attack in UWSN. Furthermore, the performance of this algorithm is demonstrated in UnetStack with reference to end to end packet delay, with and without implementation of the algorithm. © 2021 IEEE.