Secure Data Transmission in Underwater Sensor Network: Survey and Discussion

Abstract

The security of information has become a crucial issue in today’s digital world. The reason being an ever-increasing number of web-based applications and the use of proficient hacking techniques by hackers to gain unauthorized access to confidential information. Digital data can be hacked from two positions, viz. static or dynamic. The dynamic position of digital data is synonymous to data which is in a transmission phase whereas static data is a standalone data in servers, sensors or memory chips. According to physics, developing security protocols for data that is in a dynamic position is always a great challenge as compared to static one. For instance, Alice transmits data packets to Bob with the motive of not just sharing the information but perhaps Alice aims to share the information by providing the highest possible security to the data so that the data is only accessed by authorized personnel (Bob). Data transmission can be divided into two types, namely Terrestrial and Underwater Data Transmission. To date, lots of research has been conducted for securing terrestrial data transmission, but very less research has been done to provide security to data which is transferred underwater. The state of art and its parametric analysis done in chapter proves that underwater data transmission in itself is a great challenge due to various limitations of underwater communication mediums like lower bandwidth, propagation delay, noise, multipath effect, doppler spread, path loss and so on. These challenges make the underwater networks as one of the most vulnerable networks for many different security attacks occurring in different network layer like a wormhole, sybil, homing, sinkhole and many more are presented in the chapter under the heading of, “Attacks in UWSN”. According, to the complete survey and discussion done in this chapter, it can be stated that “Underwater Data Security is the heart of UWSN”. Thus, underwater data security is a necessity as UWSN is prone to various security threats and malicious attacks in addition to problems of dynamic underwater environment and communication mediums. Earth is a water planet and around 71% of the earth’s surface is covered by water. In spite of this water to land ratio of the world the “secure underwater data transmission” is a technologically lesser-explored area. Therefore, this survey work will intrigue many researchers to work on underwater sensor networks and to find innovative solutions for transferring digital data securely in the underwater environment. The proposed future work is to develop an innovative architectural model named “ACOOP UWSN” with a strong security protocol by using both optical and acoustic waves as a medium of data communication.