An Efficient Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) Environment

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) and Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSN) are technologies that benefit multiple disciplines, including offshore exploration, aquaculture, and natural disaster prediction. Given the challenging operating conditions with the inherent capacity limitations of underwater sensors, specialized protocols are necessary to ensure secure and efficient communication. In this paper, we highlight some of the advancements related to UWSNs. Based on a comprehensive review of previous work, we propose a protocol that considers security and performance requirements using lightweight operations and mutual authentication, which is a security process in which both parties establish the identity of the other to gain confidence in the communication before any data is exchanged. In the UWSNs setting, this implies achieving secure communication between nodes and base stations. The scheme’s performance was evaluated using Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols Applications (AVISPA) simulation. We can confirm that the proposed protocol outperforms previous work regarding security, computational overhead, and communication cost. Additionally, comparative analysis demonstrates that our protocol withstands different types of cyber-attacks while achieving an improved overall performance compared to other related schemes.