Secure and efficient communications with fine-grained access control in underwater wireless sensor networks

Abstract

As UWSN have received attention, a need for an efficient and secure communication protocol has arisen to overcome the low device performance, node failure, and high propagation latency. However, existing works are either specialized for one-to-one communication or cannot satisfy low latency constraints. Therefore, this work proposes a secure communication protocol with fine-grained access control for UWSN that support secure and efficient one-to-many communication and considers potential internal attackers for high security level. Specifically, we adopt lightweight ABE to achieve fine-grained access control at low cost, and introduce outsourced decryption to further alleviate the computational load of underwater sensors.