A Novel Authentication Mechanism for Securing Underwater Wireless Sensors from Sybil Attack

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN) has vast application areas. Due to the unprotected nature, underwater security is a prime concern. UWSN becomes vulnerable to different attacks due to malicious nodes. Sybil attack is one of the major attacks in UWSN. Most of the proposed security methods are based on encryption and decryption which consumes resources of the sensor nodes. In this paper, a simple authentication mechanism is proposed for securing the UWSN from the Sybil attack. As the nodes have very less computation power and energy resources so this work is not followed any kind of encryption and decryption technique. An authentication process is designed in such a way that node engaged in communication authenticate neighboring nodes by node ID and the data stored in the cluster head. This work is also addressed sensor node compromisation issue through Hierarchical Fuzzy System (HFS) based trust management model. The trust management model has been simulated in Xfuzzy-3.5. After the simulation conducted, the proposed trust management mechanism depicts significant performance on detecting compromised nodes.