Underwater and Submerged Wireless Sensor Systems: Security Issues and Solutions

This chapter discusses security breaches in underwater wireless sensor systems (UWSSs) and the security solutions that can prevent them. It first presents some background information about UWSSs and discusses some of its design and security-related challenges. The chapter also discusses security issues of UWSSs, and provides some future research challenges and opportunities for security in UWSSs. These challenges are related to security of localization, cross-layer design and time synchronization. UWSSs are similar to terrestrial wireless sensor systems in terms of their functions, structure and energy limitations. Cryptographic mechanisms are used to enforce authentication, data confidentiality and integrity requirements. There are two types of cryptographic mechanism for encryption: asymmetric key cryptography and symmetric key cryptography. Since UWSSs have security vulnerabilities, they are prone to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The chapter discusses some of these attacks and possible solutions to mitigate them: jamming, power exhaustion, sybil attack, and sinkhole attack.