Securing underwater acoustic communications through analog network coding

Abstract

We propose a new secure underwater acoustic communication scheme designed to let a user (Alice) transmit a confidential message to another user (Bob) in the presence of an eavesdropper (Eve). A typical approach in conventional wireless physical-layer security is to rely on a friendly jammer to jam Eve through artificial noise (AN). Instead, for the first time, we propose a secure underwater communication scheme that relies on cooperative friendly jamming through CDMA-based analog network coding (ANC). The cooperative friendly jammer transmits information using the same spreading code used in the legitimate Alice-Bob link. The information transmitted by the cooperative jammer is known a priori to Bob, but not to Eve. Although the jammer's packet will also interfere at Bob, we show that after jointly estimating the two multipath-affected channels, Bob can suppress the interfering packet and decode Alice's packet, while Eve cannot. We also formulate the problem of joint optimal selection of friendly jammer and power allocation (for Alice and the jammer) that minimize Eve's capability of intercepting the signal while guaranteeing a predefined level of quality of service (QoS) for Bob. The proposed scheme is implemented in a testbed based on Teledyne Benthos Telesonar SM-975 underwater modems and tested extensively in Lake LaSalle at the University at Buffalo. Experiments and simulations demonstrate that, for a given energy budget, the proposed scheme can guarantee much higher bit error rate (BER) at Eve, while creating minimal BER disturbance at Bob, compared to the ANaided approach.

Modeling Underwater Acoustic Channels in Short-range Shallow Water Environments

“…Each data packet contains a preamble, a chirp signals of duration 100 ms sweeping the bandwidth from 10 Hz to 5.12 kHz. The chirp signal is appended to each packet and is used for channel probing, symbol synchronization for chip-matched filtering, and multipath delay spread estimation [19]. The chirp signals are in baseband and are modulated by multiplying by the carrier fc before transmission.…”

Secure Localization Using Coordinated Gradient Descent Technique for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

“…In some advertise environment, some nodes leads to an incorrect localization. The type of attacks is classified into the coordinated attacks and Non-Coordinated attacks [5].…”

“…To overcome these problems, some efficient resistant methods (node deployment schemes) have been introduced. Gradient Descent Secure Localization (GDSL) [2], Least Mean Square (LMS) [4], and Voting Based Scheme (VBS) [5] are the some of the important secured localization methods from location accuracy point of view. The localization error of these methods is almost same but the complexity of GDSL is comparatively less than the other methods.…”

Secure communication for underwater acoustic sensor networks

“…For example, in [3], the authors proposed a secure underwater communication scheme based on cooperative friendly jamming, which is Jamming through Analog Network Coding (J-ANC). Unlike conventional cooperative jamming secure schemes, which employ artificial noise as a jamming source, J-ANC utilizes the same spreading code used by a legitimate link.…”