A secure routing scheme for underwater acoustic networks

Secure and anonymous routing is required in many underwater acoustic network applications such as marine military. However, the characteristics of underwater acoustic networks cause existing secure scheme designed for traditional terrestrial networks to be inapplicable. This article presents a secure routing design for underwater acoustic networks. First, considering the difficulty of setting a trusted third party in underwater acoustic networks, a short signature algorithm without any online trusted third party is proposed and is used in the procedure of route setup for authentication between source and destination node pair. Analysis shows that the proposed signature scheme can resist forgery attacks effectively and improve communication security and signature efficiency. Second, a trap-door scheme in routing messages based on bilinear map is presented, which achieves anonymity of communication nodes to forwarding nodes. Finally, the anonymity of intermediate nodes in the routing path is also realized by encoding their session ID. Simulation results show the secure routing scheme has moderate network performance under the premise of secure communication.