A vulnerability study of geographic routing in Underwater Acoustic Networks

Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs) are utilized in many sensitive commercial, scientific and military applications. However, current network protocols have not been designed to defend against security attacks that can block or degrade network communication and performance. Geographic routing is an essential service used in UANs and current protocols are quite vulnerable. In this paper we call attention to unique factors of UANs that need to be considered when designing secure network protocols and study the vulnerabilities of geographic routing in UANs. We investigate the effects of location spoofing on a standard UAN geographic routing protocol, Depth-Based Routing (DBR), as a case study. We provide a preliminary spoofing attack that can stop network traffic from reaching its destination. Attack performance is given using detailed simulation analysis. Lastly, we improve our attack by using a placement scheme to sample positions in the deployment area in order to increase the attack effectiveness while meeting energy constraints. Our attack is tested on both static and mobile UANs.