Lightweight Multi-factor Authentication for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are liable to malicious attacks due to limited bandwidth, limited power, high propagation delay, path loss, and variable speed. The major differences between UWSNs and Terrestrial Wireless Sensor Networks (TWSNs) necessitate a new mechanism to secure UWSNs. The existing Media Access Control (MAC) and routing protocols have addressed the network performance of UWSNs, but are vulnerable to several attacks. The secure MAC and routing protocols must exist to detect Sybil, Blackhole, Wormhole, Hello Flooding, Acknowledgment Spoofing, Selective Forwarding, Sinkhole, and Exhaustion attacks. These attacks can disrupt or disable the network connection. Hence, these attacks can degrade the network performance and total loss can be catastrophic in some applications, like monitoring oil/gas spills. Several researchers have studied the security of UWSNs, but most of the works detect malicious attacks solely based on a certain predefined threshold. It is not optimal to detect malicious attacks after the threshold value is met. In this paper, we propose a multi-factor authentication model that is based on zero-knowledge proof to detect malicious activities and secure UWSNs from several attacks.