Security of Underwater and Air-Water Wireless Communication

Abstract

We present a first detailed survey that focuses on the security challenges faced by the underwater and air-water (A-W) wireless communication networks (WCNs), as well as the countermeasures proposed to date. Specifically, we provide a detailed literature review of the various kinds of active and passive attacks which hamper the confidentiality, integrity, authentication and availability of both underwater and A-W WCNs. For clarity of exposition, this survey paper is mainly divided into two parts. The first part of the paper is essentially a primer on underwater and A-W WCNs whereby we outline the benefits and drawbacks of the three promising underwater and A-W candidate technologies: radio frequency (RF), acoustic, and optical, along with channel modelling. To this end, we also describe the indirect (relay-aided) and direct mechanisms for the A-W WCNs along with channel modelling. This sets the stage for the second part (and main contribution) of the paper whereby we provide a thorough comparative discussion of a vast set of works that have reported the security breaches (as well as viable countermeasures) for many diverse configurations of the underwater and A-W WCNs. Finally, we highlight some research gaps in the open literature and identify some open problems for the future work.