Blockchain-Assisted Onion Routing Protocol for Internet of Underwater Vehicle Communication

Leveraging the advancements in the Internet of underwater vehicles (IoUVs) has been actively explored with remarkable potential applications, such as ocean mapping, exploring marine and geological formation, monitoring shipwrecks, ocean patrolling, and surveillance. However, the communication between IoUVs and the control station is highly affected by modern security threats, such as insecure authentication, unpatched access control, and data integrity attacks. To mitigate the aforementioned security issues, in this article, we have proposed an intelligent collaborative framework by amalgamating artificial intelligence (AI) and onion routing (OR) in the IoUV environment. First, AI-enabled classifiers classify the normal and malicious IoUV data to reduce the computational overhead of the OR network. Then, the data is traversed from the multi-layered encrypted OR network and simultaneously validated by verifying token and time-to-live to securely reach its destination. The incorporation of inter planetary file system (IPFS) makes the proposed framework cost-effective and scalable. Finally, the proposed framework is assessed by various evaluation metrics, such as accuracy, decryption time, and scalability.