2019_programme: TOWARDS PHYSICAL LAYER CRYPTOGRAPHY FOR UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC NETWORKING

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  • Session: 05. Underwater Communications and Networking
    Organiser(s): Tsimenidis Charalampos, Mitchell Paul, Pelekanakis konstantinos
  • Lecture: TOWARDS PHYSICAL LAYER CRYPTOGRAPHY FOR UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC NETWORKING [invited]
    Paper ID: 897
    Author(s): Pelekanakis Konstantinos, Gussen Camila, Petroccia Roberto, Alves Joao
    Presenter: Pelekanakis Konstantinos
    Presentation type: oral
    Abstract: Two main approaches for securing a wireless link are symmetric encryption and public key encryption. Both of these are applied to upper layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) stack. Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs) typically have an ad-hoc structure and the use of public keys becomes not practical since there is no infrastructure that supports key management and authentication. Symmetric key strategies involve the distribution of new keys when new nodes join the network in the middle of a mission and this may not be desirable. In addition, if the current key is compromised, and is also used to share the future key, then secure communications is not possible anymore. Following the line of thought in radio communications, we investigate Physical Layer Security (PLS) for UANs. PLS leverages on the uncorrelated nature of multipath over space, and channel reciprocity to independently generate a cryptographic key between two authenticated nodes even if an eavesdropper is in their vicinity. In this initial study, we set up a network of two legitimate nodes and one eavesdropper in a shallow water environment in the Gulf of La Spezia, Italy, and we analyse thousands of channel-probe signals transmitted over different days and hours between the two legitimate nodes. We show that typical Channel Impulse Response (CIR) features, such as the L2/L0 norm, a smooth sparseness measure and the Root-Mean-Square (RMS) delay spread, can exploit reciprocity between the two legitimate nodes. However, when the eavesdropper is about a meter away from one of the legitimate nodes, then the smooth channel sparseness yields the best performance. With this feature, the probability of the legitimate nodes to independently generate the same key is three orders of magnitude higher than that of the eavesdropper.
      Download the full paper
  • Corresponding author: Dr Pelekanakis Konstantinos
    Affiliation: NATO STO CMRE
    Country: Italy
    e-mail:

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