Replay-Attack Countermeasures for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Security is an important service of Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs). In this work, we investigate the impact of four different replay attacks and propose two counteracting methods. The first method is based on the observation of the packet generation timestamp and the second method uses the HASH value of the packet generation timestamp combined with the address of the source node. These two methods are implemented between the routing and Media Access Control (MAC) layers of the DESERT communications protocol stack. Our simulation results show that the proposed countermeasures almost neutralise the attacks for two different network topologies.