Ricerc@Sapienza

Nowadays, underwater acoustic communication is an interesting topic of research. This is especially true in the case of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs): due to the limitations of the underwater environment, where WiFi and radio communications are limited, it is very important to rely on efficient and reliable tools for acoustic data exchange. Indeed, an underwater network of acoustic nodes can enhance the navigation and localization capabilities of one or more vehicles.

The paper concerns a comparative performance evaluation of protocols for two honest parties to securely share a common secret session key in an Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network (UASN) scenario. The simulation-based comparison is performed by implementing in SUNSET SDCS three key exchange protocols and two solutions for implicit certificate distribution. The three key exchange solutions are the Fully Hashed Menezes-Qu-Vanstone, the Hashed One-pass Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (both based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography) and Diffie-Hellman.