SECURING UNDERWATER WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

CONTENTS 1. Overview

2.
2.1 2.2

Introduction
Overview of Underwater Wireless Communication Networks Difficulties Encountered in UWCNs

3.
3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

Attacks and Defence Mechanisms

Overview of DoS Attacks Jamming and Spread Spectrum Technique to Counter Jamming Wormholes and Dis-VoW for Wormhole Detection Sybil Attack - Authentication and Position Verification

4.
4.1

Research Challenges
Secure Time Synchronization, Localization and Routing

5.

Conclusion

6.

References

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SECURING UNDERWATER WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

1. Overview

Underwater wireless communication networks (UWCNs) include sensors and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that interact to perform specific applications such as underwater monitoring. Coordination and information sharing between sensors and AUVs make the provision of security challenging.

The unique characteristics of the underwater acoustic channel and the differences between such networks and their ground based counterparts require the development of efficient and reliable security mechanisms.

The aquatic environment is particularly vulnerable to malicious attacks due to the high bit error rates, large and variable propagation delay, low bandwidth of acoustic channels in water. Achieving reliable inter vehicle and sensor-AUV communication is especially difficult due to the mobility of AUVs and the movement of sensors with water currents.

The above mentioned characteristics of UWCNs have several security issues associated like packet errors, eavesdropping, modification of packets, and many more. Also since power consumption in underwater communications is higher than in terrestrial radio communications energy exhaustion attacks can reduce network life.

The different attacks possible are Jamming, Wormholes, Selective Forwarding, Sybil Attacks, etc. Defences for these are discussed. Jamming can be overcome by Spread Spectrum techniques, Wormhole detection is done with a visual modelling using Dis-VoW and other attacks can be countered by authentication, verification, and positioning.

Open research challenges for secure localization, routing and time synchronization are mentioned.

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SECURING UNDERWATER WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

In this paper UWCNs is discussed, with emphasis on the possible attacks, countermeasures and further opportunities and scope for development in this direction to improve security of such networks.

2. Introduction

2.1

Overview of Underwater Wireless Communication Networks

Underwater wireless communication networks (UWCNs) consist of sensors and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that interact, coordinate and share information with each other to carry out sensing and monitoring functions. A pictorial representation is shown below:

In last several years, underwater communication network (UWCN) has found an increasing use in a widespread range of applications, such as coastal surveillance systems, environmental research, autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) operation, oil-rig maintenance, collection of data for water monitoring, linking submarines to land, to name a few. By deploying a distributed and scalable sensor network in a 3-dimensional underwater space, each underwater sensor can monitor and detect environmental parameters and events locally. Hence, compared with remote sensing, UWCNs provide a better sensing and surveillance technology to acquire better data to understand the spatial and temporal complexities of underwater environments.

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SECURING UNDERWATER WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

Present underwater communication systems involve the transmission of information in the form of sound, electromagnetic (EM), or optical waves. Each of these techniques has advantages and limitations. Based on applications there are three types of UWSNs (sensor networks): 1) Mobile UWSNs for long-term non-time critical applications (M-LT-UWSNs); 2) Static UWSNs for long-term non-time critical applications (S-LT-UWSNs); 3) Mobile UWSNs for short-term time-critical applications (M-ST-UWSNs).

Besides the UWSNs mentioned above, underwater networks also include sparse mobile AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) or UUV (unmanned underwater vehicle) networks, where vehicles/nodes can be spaced out by several kilometres. These types of networks have their unique communication requirements. Among the three types of waves, acoustic waves are used as the primary carrier for underwater wireless communication systems due to the relatively low absorption in underwater environments. The security requirements to be met in UWCNs are:
1. Authentication: Authentication is the proof that the data received was sent by a legitimate

sender. This is essential in military and safety-critical applications of UWCNs.

2. Confidentiality: Confidentiality means that information is not accessible to unauthorized

third parties. It needs to be guaranteed in critical applications such as maritime surveillance.

3. Integrity: It ensures that information has not been altered by any adversary. Many

underwater sensor applications for environmental preservation, such as water quality monitoring, rely on the integrity of information.
4. Availability: The data should be available when needed by an authorized user. Lack of

availability due to denial-of-service attacks would especially affect time-critical aquatic exploration applications such as prediction of seaquakes. Some common terminology used here is defined:
1. Attack: Attempt to gain unauthorized access to a service, resource, or information, or the

attempt to compromise integrity, availability, or confidentiality.

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2. Attacker, Intruder, Adversary: The originator of an attack. 3. Vulnerability: Weakness in system security design, implementation, or limitations that could

be exploited.
4. Threat: Any circumstance or event (such as the existence of an attacker and vulnerabilities)

with the potential to adversely impact a system through a security breach.

5. Defence: An idea or system or model that counters an attack.

2.2

Difficulties Encountered in UWCNs

Acoustic communication is the most versatile and widely used technique in underwater environments due to the low attenuation (signal reduction) of sound in water. This is especially true in thermally stable, deep water settings. On the other hand, the use of acoustic waves in shallow water can be adversely affected by temperature gradients, surface ambient noise, and multipath propagation due to reflection and refraction. The much slower speed of acoustic propagation in water, about 1500 m/s (meters per second), compared with that of electromagnetic and optical waves, and are another limiting factor for efficient communication and networking.

On the front of using electromagnetic (EM) waves in radio frequencies, conventional radio does not work well in an underwater environment due to the conducting nature of the medium, especially in the case of seawater. However, if EM could be working underwater, even in a short distance, its much faster propagating speed is definitely a great advantage for faster and efficient communication among nodes.

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SECURING UNDERWATER WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

Optical waves used as wireless communication carriers are generally limited to very short distances because the severe water absorption at the optical frequency band and strong backscatter from suspending particles. Even the clearest water has 1000 times the attenuation of clear air, and turbid water has more than 100 times the attenuation of the densest fog. Nevertheless, underwater FSO, especially in the blue-green wavelengths, offers a practical choice for high-bandwidth communication (10-150 Mbps, bits per second) over moderate ranges (10-100 meters). This communication range is much needed in harbour inspection, oil-rig maintenance, and linking submarines to land, etc.

Scattering is a general physical process whereby one or more localized non-uniformities in the medium, such as particles and bubbles, force some forms of wave radiation to deviate from a straight trajectory. It also includes deviation of reflected radiation from the angle predicted by the law of reflection. This is especially relevant to underwater channels. When the wind speed increases, the surface roughens and the effect of surface scattering becomes evident. Surface scattering introduces not only power loss, but also spreading in delay of each surface bounce path.

Underwater sensors are sparsely deployed and move with water currents, and AUVs are mobile. Although certain nodes in underwater applications are anchored to the bottom of the ocean, other applications require sensors to be suspended at certain depths or to move freely in the underwater medium. Attaining reliable inter-vehicle and sensor-AUV communication is particularly challenging due to the motion of AUVs and the movement of sensors with water currents.

UWCNs cannot rely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) for geographical positioning because it uses radar waves in the 1.5 GHz band that do not propagate in water.

Underwater communication systems have more stringent power requirements than terrestrial systems because acoustic communications are more power-hungry, and typical transmission

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SECURING UNDERWATER WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

distances in UWCNs are greater; hence, higher transmit power is required to ensure coverage.

Security inferences of the aforementioned issues are:

High bit error rates cause packet errors. Consequently, crucial security packets can be lost. Wireless underwater channels can be eavesdropped on. Attackers may intercept the information transmitted and attempt to modify or drop packets.

Malicious nodes can create out-of band connections via fast radio (above the water surface) and wired links, which are referred to as wormholes. Since sensors are mobile, their relative distances vary with time. The dynamic topology of the underwater sensor network not only facilitates the creation of wormholes but it also complicates their detection.

Due to high power consumption and sparse deployment of nodes, energy exhaustion attacks pose a threat to the networks lifetime.

3. Attacks and Threats

3.1

Overview of DoS Attacks

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SECURING UNDERWATER WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

Classically, the definition of denial-of-service (DoS) comprises three components: authorized users, a shared service, and a maximum waiting time. Authorized users are said to deny service to other authorized users when they prevent access to or use of a shared service for longer than some maximum waiting time. Broadly it can be defined as the result of any action that prevents any part of a WSN from functioning correctly or in a timely manner. A DoS attack usually has the following properties:

Malicious: The act is performed intentionally, not accidentally. Accidental failures are the domain of fault-tolerance and reliability engineering. Since such failures can potentially produce equally disruptive results as DoS attacks, these fields have important contributions to make to the robustness of WSNs. They are not considered DoS, however, due to the lack of malice.

Disruptive: A successful DoS attack degrades or disrupts some capability or service in the WSN. If the effect is not measurable, for example if it is prevented altogether, we may still say that an attack has occurred, but DoS has not.

Asymmetric: Often the effect of an attack is much greater than the effort required to mount it.

A few of the common DoS attacks faced by UWCNs are described briefly: The major attacks are jamming, wormholes, and Sybil attack which will be discussed in detail. Other attacks discussed in brief are:

Sinkhole Attack: A malicious node attempts to attract traffic from a particular area toward it. Geographic routing and authentication of nodes swapping routing information are possible defences against this attack

Acknowledgement Spoofing: A malicious node eavesdropping packets sent to neighbour nodes can use this information to spoof link layer acknowledgments with the objective of reinforcing a weak link or a link located in a shadow zone in which sound waves cannot penetrate. A solution to this attack would be encryption of all packets sent through the network.

HELLO Flood Attack: A node receiving a HELLO packet from a malicious node may interpret that the adversary is a neighbour. Bidirectional link verification can overcome this.

3.2

Jamming and Spread Spectrum Technique to Counter Jamming

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SECURING UNDERWATER WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

Jamming is deliberate interference with radio reception to deny the target's use of a communication channel. For single-frequency networks, it is simple and effective, rendering the jammed node unable to communicate or coordinate with others in the network. A jamming attack consists of interfering with the physical channel by putting up carriers on the frequencies used by nodes to communicate. Since it requires a lot of energy, attackers usually attack in sporadic bursts. Since underwater acoustic frequency bands are narrow (from a few to hundreds of kilohertz), UWCNs are vulnerable to narrowband jamming. Localization is affected by the replay attack when the attacker jams the communication between a sender and a receiver, and later replays the same message with stale information (an incorrect reference) posing as the sender (shown in figure below).

The most common defence against jamming attacks is the use of spread-spectrum communication. In frequency hopping, a device transmits a signal on a frequency for a short period of time, changes to a different frequency and repeats. The transmitter and receiver must be coordinated. Directsequence spreads the signal over a wide band, using a pseudo-random bit stream. A receiver must know the spreading code to distinguish the signal from noise. Frequency-hopping schemes are somewhat resistant to interference from an attacker who does not know the hopping sequence. However, the attacker may be able to jam a wide band of the spectrum, or even follow the hopping sequence by scanning for the next transmission and quickly tuning the transmitter. In DSSS modulation, a narrow band waveform of bandwidth W is spread to a large bandwidth B before transmission. This is achieved by multiplying each symbol with a spreading code of length B=W, and transmitting the resulting sequence at a high rate as allowed by bandwidth B. Multiple arrivals at the receiver side can be separated via the de-spreading operation which suppresses the time-spreading induced interference.

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SECURING UNDERWATER WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

Other possible ways to counter jamming are: If jamming cannot be prevented, it may instead be detected and mapped by surrounding nodes. A description of the region may then be reported back to network monitors, who can use conventional means to remove the attacker. In-network knowledge of the extent of the jammed region may also allow for automatic routing avoidance or mobile jammer tracking. A sensor device with important data may temporarily overcome localized jamming by sending a high-power transmission to an unaffected node. This node can then relay the message on behalf of the jammed node. Such a scheme must be used sparingly, however, since a high-power transmission will prematurely drain the device's energy. If substitute modes of communication are available, such as acoustic, infrared, or optical, a node may shift to one of these schemes when the radio is jammed. However, these other channels may be jammed as well by a determined attacker.

3.3

Wormholes and Dis-VoW for Wormhole Detection

In a wormhole attack, adversaries cooperate to provide a low-latency side-channel for communication. A wormhole is an out-of-band connection created by the adversary between two physical locations in a network with lesser delay and greater bandwidth than conventional links. This connection uses fast radio (above the sea surface) or wired links to considerably decrease the propagation delay. In a wormhole attack the malicious node transfers some selected packets received at one end of the wormhole to the other end using the out-of-band connection, and re-injects them into the network. The effect is that false neighbour relationships are created, because two nodes out of each others range can incorrectly determine that they are in proximity of one another due to the wormholes presence. Routing protocols choose routes that contain wormhole links because they give the impression to be shorter; thus, the adversary can monitor network traffic and delay or drop packets sent through the wormhole. Localization protocols can also be affected by these attacks when malicious nodes claim wrong locations and mislead other nodes.

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A distributed mechanism, Dis-VoW, to detect wormhole attacks in UWCNs is proposed. In DisVoW, every sensor reconstructs local network layout using multi-dimensional scaling. It detects the wormholes by visualising the distortions in edge lengths and angles among neighbouring sensors. Dis-VoW consists of four steps:
1. Distance estimation between neighbouring sensors: After deployment, every sensor will estimate

the distances to its neighbours using the round-trip time of acoustic signals.

2. MDS: Through broadcasting these distances, every sensor will be able to use MDS to reconstruct

the local topology within two hops. Multi-dimensional scaling was originally a technique developed in behavioural and social sciences for studying relationships among objects. The inputs to MDS are measures of the difference or similarity between object pairs. The output of MDS is a layout of the objects in a low-dimensional space. Here, the input is the distance matrix among the sensors. The mechanism can reconstruct the network topology and calculate a virtual position for every node.

3. Wormhole Detection: Every sensor will examine the reconstructed network. If distortions are

discovered, the wormhole detection method will be activated so that the fake neighbour connections can be located. Various techniques are possible for wormhole detection:
a. Packet leash is proposed for wormhole prevention. A leash is information added to a packet

to restrict its transmission distance. Geographic leashes use location information and loosely synchronised clocks together to verify a neighbour relation. In temporal leashes, the packet

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transmission distance is calculated based on the propagation delay and signal transmission speed.

b. MDS-VoW is a centralised mechanism for wormhole detection in sensor networks that does

not depend on any special hardware. After reconstructing the layout of sensors using multidimensional scaling, MDS-VoW detects wormholes by visualising the anomalies introduced by the attacks, which bend the reconstructed surface to fit the fake neighbour connections. Through detecting the bending feature, wormholes are located and fake neighbour connections are identified.

c. Dis-VoW detects wormholes by visualising the distortions in edge lengths and angles among

neighbouring sensors. A normalised variable wormhole indicator is defined based on these distortions to identify fake neighbour connections.

Where M can be calculated based on the measured distances, R, which can be acquired from the reconstructed network, i, j and k are neighbours, and q is the degree of connectivity of sensor i. Every sensor will calculate wi value of itself and exchange it with the neighbours to locate the fake neighbour connections.

4. Avoidance: The detected wormholes will be avoided during routing discovery and packet

forwarding so that network safety and performance are preserved.

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Advantages of Dis-VoW: The proposed mechanism does not depend on any special hardware and the unit cost of sensors will not be impacted.

Since every sensor reconstructs the network topology and detects the wormholes in a localised manner, the computation and storage overhead is affordable for a weak node such as a sensor. Therefore, distributed detection can be conducted when the network topology changes.

Techniques from social science and scientific visualisation are integrated to solve network security problems.

The simulation results show that Dis-VoW can detect most of the fake neighbour connections without introducing many false alarms.

3.4

Sybil Attack

Most protocols assume that nodes present a single unique identity. In a Sybil attack, an attacker presents multiple identities. Coupled with insecure location claims, this means an attacker can appear to be in multiple places at the same time. By creating fake identities of nodes located at the edge of communication range all around a victim, chances are high that the attacker will be chosen

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as the next-hop in geographic forwarding. The attack can also degrade any guarantees made by a multipath routing scheme, making selective forwarding easy.

Defence: Since identity fraud is central to the Sybil attack, proper authentication is a key defence. A trusted key server or base station may be used to authenticate nodes to each other and bootstrap a shared session key for encrypted communications. This requires that every node share a secret key with the key server. If a single network key is used, compromise of any node in the UWCN would defeat all authentications. Another defence is location verification.

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SECURING UNDERWATER WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

4. Research Challenges

4.1

Secure Time Synchronization, Localization and Routing

Secure Time Synchronization: Time synchronization is crucial in many underwater applications such as synchronised sensing tasks. Also, scheduling algorithms such as time division multiple access (TDMA) require clear-cut timing between nodes to alter their sleep-wake up schedules for power saving. For example, in water quality monitoring, sensors are deployed at different depths because the chemical characteristics of water fluctuate at each level. The design of a delay-tolerant time synchronization mechanism is very important to precisely locate the water contaminant source, set up the sleep-wake up schedules among neighbouring nodes aptly, and logs the water quality data correctly into the annual database with accurate timing information. Achieving precise time synchronization is especially difficult in underwater environments due to the characteristics of UWCNs. For this reason, the time synchronization mechanisms proposed for ground-based sensor networks cannot be applied, and new mechanisms are required.

MU-Sync is a cluster-based synchronization protocol that estimates the clock skew by performing the linear regression twice over a set of local time information gathered through message exchanges. The first linear regression permits the cluster head to offset the effect of long and varying propagation delay; the second regression enables the cluster head to obtain the final estimated skew and offset. Secure Localization: Localization is a very important issue for data tagging. Sensor tasks such as reporting the occurrence of an event or checking require localization information. Localization can also help in making routing decisions. Localization approaches proposed for ground-based sensor networks do not work well underwater because long propagation delays, Doppler Effect, multipath, and fading cause disparities in the acoustic channel. Bandwidth limitations, node mobility, and sparse deployment of underwater nodes also disturb localization estimation. Localization schemes can be classified into:

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SECURING UNDERWATER WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

Anchor-based schemes: Anchor nodes are positioned at the seabed or sea surface at locations determined by GPS. The propagation delay of sound signals between the sensor or AUV and the anchors is used to compute the distance to multiple anchor nodes.

Distributed positioning schemes: Positioning infrastructure is not available, and nodes communicate only with one-hop neighbours and compute their locations using multilateration. Underwater sensor positioning (USP) has been proposed as a distributed localization scheme for sparse 3D networks, transforming the 3D underwater positioning problem into a 2D problem using a distributed nondegenerative projection technique. Using sensor depth information, the neighbouring reference nodes are mapped to the horizontal plane containing the sensor to be localized. After projecting the reference nodes, localization methods for 2D networks such as bilateration or trilateration can be used to locate the sensor.

Secure Routing: Routing is vital for packet delivery in UWCNs. For example, the Distributed Underwater Clustering Scheme does not use flooding and minimizes the practical routing message exchange. Routing is specially challenging in UWCNs due to the hefty propagation delays, the low bandwidth, the effort of battery refills of underwater sensors, and the dynamic topologies. Therefore, routing protocols should be designed to be energy-aware, robust, scalable and adaptive.

Open research issues: 1. For secure time synchronization: Efficient and secure time synchronization schemes with small computation and communications costs need to be designed to defend against delay and wormhole attacks. 2. For secure localization : Effective cryptographic techniques are required to prevent injection of false information. Algorithms able to determine the location of sensors even in the presence of Sybil and wormhole attacks have to be developed.

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SECURING UNDERWATER WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

Techniques to identify malicious or compromised nodes and to avoid false detection of these nodes are required as well as Secure localization mechanisms able to handle node mobility. 3. For secure routing: A need to develop reputation-based schemes that analyse the behaviour of neighbours and reject routing paths containing nodes that do not cooperate in routing. Quick and powerful encryption and authentication mechanisms against outside intruders should be devised for UWCNs

5. Conclusion

As UWCNs have huge scope of applications in sensitive military and intelligence fields, security of the network is of paramount importance. This report gives an overall view of the unique characteristics of UWCNs, how they differ from terrestrial wireless networks, some of the common threats and attacks faced by such a network and some solutions to overcome these problems. The further research possibilities in this area are infinite. As technology advances, attackers also can cause more damage with the help of more sophisticated tools and methods. Thus there is a requirement of continuous increase in the level of security implemented.

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SECURING UNDERWATER WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

6. References

1. Mari Carmen Domingo, Securing Underwater Wireless Communication Networks, IEEE

Wireless Communications, February 2011

2. W. Wang, J. Kong, B. Bhargava and M. Gerla, Visualization of Wormholes in Underwater

Sensor Networks: A Distributed Approach, International Journal of Security and Networks, vol. 3, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1023.
3. A. D. Wood and J. A. Stankovic, A Taxonomy for Denial-of-Service Attacks in Wireless

Sensor Networks, chapter in Handbook of Sensor Networks: Compact Wireless and Wired Sensing Systems, M. Ilyas and I. Mahgoub, Eds., CRC Press, 2004.
4. R. Zhang and Y. Zhang, Wormhole-Resilient Secure Neighbour Discovery in Underwater

Acoustic Networks, Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2010.

5. N. Chirdchoo, W.-S. Soh, and K. Chua, MU-Sync: A Time Synchronization Protocol for

Underwater Mobile Networks, Proc. WUWNet, 2008

6. H. Song, S. Zhu, and G. Cao, Attack-Resilient Time Synchronization for Wireless Sensor

Networks, Ad Hoc Net., vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 11225, 2007

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