An Investigative Analysis of Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN) Security

Abstract

The last few decades bring an astonishing revolution in technology and electronics which enabling small pieces of electronic devices into handy equipment, called sensors. The sensors enable 75% area of the world covered by water. Which is hardly 5% been explored and has numerous applications. The security of underwater wireless sensors network (UWNS) communication is a prime concern to protect advantages from technology and application purpose. This paper explores UWSN architecture, vulnerabilities, attacks, and possible factors that challenge UWSN security and its applications. The primary objective of this work is to analyze the vulnerable factors that cause security challenges and threats to UWSN applications. This study focuses on the intermediate uplink point of UWSN architecture and evaluates it in three different test cases. This would be beneficial to build a better solution by devising an appropriate scheme in the future. The denial of service (DoS) attack is simulated using ns-3 and Aquasim-ng simulator to determine which factor(s) threatening to the UWSN environment. The simulation is performed under three idealized underwater scenarios; 1) depicts general UWSN (a hybrid architecture), 2) a special case depicts UWSN environment with only underwater components, ands 3) depicts another special case with underwater sink UWSN environment. Assuming all three test case environments are vulnerable and threats to UWSN security. In all three scenarios, the average network performance in the normal transmission is 88% and about ± 3% deviation is observed. Also, it observed that scenarios 1 and 2 are influenced by the adversary interference or malicious activity while there are no such effects that occur in scenario 3 in the absence of intermediate radio link or surface sink node(s). Thus, experiments found that among others, the intermediate radio link(s) of the onshore surface sink(s) or surface buoy(s) are vulnerable and threats to UWSN. The simulation results and observations found that the intermediate up-link in UWSN architecture found to be more vulnerable which makes it insecure. While, in a pure underwater environment, seem to be more secure compared to the general UWSN environment. In the future, more factors will be evaluate in the same or different cases to determine the UWSN issues and other vulnerable factors