SeFLOOD: A secure network discovery protocol for Underwater Acoustic Networks

An Underwater Acoustic Network (UAN) raises many issues in terms of security. In this paper we focus on attacks performed during the network discovery phase. At the state of art, all underwater discovery protocols do not provide message authenticity so they are exposed to spoofing-based attacks against network integrity and availability. In this paper, we focus on FLOOD, a network discovery protocol for UANs and we extend it in order to provide protection against network authenticity and integrity attacks. In particular we show that certain attacks against integrity and leading to Denial of Service are avoided.