BEKMP: A Blockchain-Enabled Key Management Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

This paper introduces a new blockchain-assisted key management protocol specifically designed for clustered Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs). The protocol focuses on simplifying cross-cluster reauthentication for mobile underwater devices and reducing the risks of internal attacks caused by compromised nodes. To address the resource limitations of UASN devices, the protocol utilizes Elliptic Curve Qu Vanstone (ECQV) certificates, which considerably reduce Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) overhead. Moreover, it integrates the Hashed One-pass Menezes-QuVanstone (HOMQV) protocol with blockchain technology to enhance key exchange security against active attacks. The blockchain is hosted on resource-intensive surface nodes that serve as cluster heads and decentralized authorities for certificate management. Smart contracts embedded within the blockchain facilitate certificate-related operations and node trust scoring mechanism. We compared the proposed solution against a state-of-the-art benchmark and demonstrated that it imposes lower computational and communication overheads while exhibiting robustness against various attacks, as confirmed by the AVISPA tool. The solution is implemented on actual underwater/surface devices and validated experimentally. By leveraging the immutable, traceable, and fault-tolerant properties of blockchain, it establishes a secure, scalable, and efficient communication framework for mission-critical UASN applications.