A Survey of Sybil Attack Countermeasures in Underwater Sensor and Acoustic Networks
Zuriati Ahmad Zukarnain, Oluwatosin Ahmed Amodu, Cui Wenting, Umar Ali Bukar
Abstract
Underwater sensors and acoustic networks have several unique applications including water quality and ocean life monitoring as well as ocean navigation and exploration. They also have peculiar physical layer characteristics with respect to operating frequency and attenuation which makes them different from terrestrial wireless sensor communication, thus coupled with their large cost of deployment, and sensitivity, they are highly vulnerable, to security attacks. For instance a Sybil node could pretends to be at several other locations in the sparse network at the same time thereby deceiving legitimate nodes and infringing on the security of transmitted information. Over the last few years, researchers have studied means of preventing, detecting, and mitigating Sybil attacks for safe underwater communication under different assumptions and architectural setups. However, to our knowledge, these efforts have been scattered in literature and concrete lessons have not been drawn from these efforts towards achieving a safe underwater communication via a survey/review on this subject. This motivates the presentation of this paper that provides an exposition of the academic discussion on the solutions for addressing Sybil attacks in underwater wireless communication, with respect to attack prevention, detection and mitigation while identifying some of their limitations. Similarly, proposed methods and technical aspects peculiar to these works are identified, and an wide range of challenges, opportunities as well as providing recommendations.