A collaborative reputation system for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs) are often employed in mission critical scenarios such as disaster monitoring, military surveillance and many other strategic tasks which usually require high data integrity and timely fault detection and recovery. Albeit crucial to achieving such goals, security in UANs has only been partially investigated so far. Because of the various challenges that arise when dealing with underwater wireless transmission, algorithms and systems designed for traditional Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are not generally applicable. Distributed reputation-based trust systems have been proven to be an effective tool to counteract many different attacks by detecting malicious activity regardless of the specific threat, with multiple schemes being proposed in the recent past for WSNs but only some for UANs. This Thesis presents an innovative collaborative reputation system for UANs that uses Trust Related Data (TRD) sharing, propagation and aggregation to allow nodes that are far apart to form an opinion about each other. Furthermore, the proposed architecture is implemented as a module in DESERT Underwater and tested through simulations.