A Novel and Robust Authentication Protocol for Secure Underwater Communication Systems

Underwater communication systems are vital for applications such as environmental monitoring, military surveillance, and offshore exploration. However, existing authentication protocols for underwater networks are often inefficient, vulnerable to replay and impersonation attacks, and lack resilience to node failures, a gap not fully addressed by current standards. The proposed study presents the design and implementation of a novel authentication protocol tailored for underwater communication systems. The approach leverages pentatope elliptic curve cryptography for efficient key generation and secure data exchange, ensuring robust protection against common cyber threats. Formal security analysis using BAN logic and the Scyther tool verifies resistance to replay, impersonation, and eavesdropping attacks, with no successful attacks detected in over 60 test cases. The resulting design demonstrates significant improvements in computational efficiency and resilience to adversarial attacks, ensuring scalable and reliable underwater communications. Thus, it represents a critical advancement in securing underwater networks, paving the way for practical deployment in mission-critical applications. The proposed protocol reduces total communication overhead to 2,112 bits (a 30–34% reduction) and lowers computational cost to 0.4 ms per entity, significantly improving efficiency compared to existing schemes. Furthermore, the protocol incorporates fallback authentication peers to ensure resilience under partial node outages.