Biblio

Acoustic communication is a key enabler for underwater Internet of Things networks between autonomous underwater platforms. Underwater Internet of Things networks face a harsh communications environment and limited energy resources which makes them susceptible to interference, whether intentional (i.e., jamming) or unintentional. Resilient, power efficient waveforms and modulation schemes are needed for underwater acoustic communications in order to avoid outages and excessive power drain. We explore the impact of modulation scheme on the resiliency of underwater acoustic communications in the presence of channel impairments, interference, and jamming. In particular, we consider BFSK and OFDM schemes for underwater acoustic communications and assess the utility of Polar coding for strengthening resiliency.

For the smart campus of Guangdong Ocean University, we analyze the current situation of the university's network construction, as well as the problems in infrastructure, equipment, operation management, and network security. We focus on the construction objectives and design scheme of the smart campus, including the design of network structure and basic network services. The followings are considered in this study: optimization of network structure simplification, business integration, multi-operator access environment, operation and maintenance guarantee system, organic integration of production, and teaching and research after network leveling transformation.

The marine and maritime domain is well represented in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) envisaged by the United Nations, which aim at conserving and using the oceans, seas and their resources for sustainable development. At the same time, there is a need for improved safety in navigation, especially in coastal areas. Up to date, there exist operational services based on advanced technologies, including remote sensing and in situ monitoring networks which provide aid to the navigation and control over the environment for its preservation. Yet, the possibilities offered by crowdsensing have not yet been fully explored. This paper addresses this issue by presenting an app based on a crowdsensing approach for improved safety and awareness at sea. The app can be integrated into more comprehensive systems and frameworks for environmental monitoring as envisaged in our future work.

Purpose: Determine the main theoretical aspects of managing the resilience of an industrial enterprise in conditions of uncertainty. Method: The static control methods include the technology of the matrix aggregate computer (MAC) and the R-lenses, and the dynamic control methods - the technology based on the 4x6 matrix model. All these methods are based on the results of the theory of fuzzy sets and soft computing. Result: A comparative analysis of the resilience of 82 largest industrial enterprises in five industry classes was carried out, R-lenses were constructed for these classes, and the main factors affecting the resilience of industrial companies were evaluated. Conclusions: The central problem points in assessing and ensuring the resilience of enterprises are: a) correct modeling of external disturbances; b) ensuring the statistical homogeneity of the source data array.

To ensure a ship’s fully operational status in a wide spectrum of missions, as passenger transportation, international trade, and military activities, numerous interdependent systems are essential. Despite the potential critical consequences of misunderstanding or ignoring those interdependencies, there are very few documented approaches to enable their identification, representation, analysis, and use. From the cybersecurity point of view, if an anomaly occurs on one of the interdependent systems, it could eventually impact the whole ship, jeopardizing its mission success. This paper presents a proposal to identify the main dependencies of layers within and between generic ship’s functional blocks. An analysis of one of these layers, the platform systems, is developed to examine a naval cyber-physical system (CPS), the water management for passenger use, and its associated dependencies, from an intrinsic perspective. This analysis generates a three layers graph, on which dependencies are represented as oriented edges. Each abstraction level of the graph represents the physical, digital, and system variables of the examined CPS. The obtained result confirms the interest of graphs for dependencies representation and analysis. It is an operational depiction of the different systems interdependencies, on which can rely a cybersecurity evaluation, like anomaly detection and propagation assessment.

Naval vessels infrastructures are evolving towards increasingly connected and automatic systems. Such accelerated complexity boost to search for more adapted and useful navigation devices may be at odds with cybersecurity, making necessary to develop adapted analysis solutions for experts. This paper introduces a novel process to visualize and analyze naval Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) using oriented graphs, considering operational constraints, to represent physical and functional connections between multiple components of CPS. Rapid prototyping of interconnected components is implemented in a semi-automatic manner by defining the CPS’s digital and physical systems as nodes, along with system variables as edges, to form three layers of an oriented graph, using the open-source Neo4j software suit. The generated multi-layer graph can be used to support cybersecurity analysis, like attacks simulation, anomaly detection and propagation estimation, applying existing or new algorithms.

Underwater networks have the potential to allow previously unexplored applications as well as improve our ability to observe and forecast the ocean. Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) are often deployed in unprecedented and hostile waters and face many security threats. Applications based on UASNs such as coastal defense, pollution monitoring, assisted navigation to name a few, require secure communication. A new set of communication protocols and cooperative coordination algorithms have been proposed to enable collaborative monitoring tasks. However, such protocols overlook security as a key performance indicator. Spoofing, altering, or replaying routing information can affect the entire network, making UASN vulnerable to routing attacks such as selective forwarding, sinkhole attack, Sybil attack, acknowledgement spoofing and HELLO flood attack. The lack of security against such threats is startling if it is observed that security is indeed an important requirement in many emerging civilian and military applications. In this work, the sinkhole attack prevalent among UASNs is looked at and discuss mitigation approaches that can feasibly be implemented in UnetStack3.

Because the underwater acoustic communication network transmits data through the underwater acoustic wireless link, the Underwater Acoustic Communication Network is easy to suffer from the external artificial interference, in this paper, the detection algorithm of wormhole attack in Underwater Acoustic Communication Network based on Azimuth measurement technology is studied. The existence of wormhole attack is judged by Azimuth or distance outliers, and the security performance of underwater acoustic communication network is evaluated. The influence of different azimuth direction errors on the detection probability of wormhole attack is analyzed by simulation. The simulation results show that this method has a good detection effect for Underwater Acoustic Communication Network.

Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs) have long been recognized as an instrumental technology in various fields, from ocean monitoring to defense settings. Their security, though, has been scarcely investigated despite the strategic areas involved and the intrinsic vulnerability due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. In this work, we focus on attacks for which the attacker has partial or total knowledge of the network protocol stack. Our strategy uses a watchdog layer that allows upper layers to gather knowledge of overheard packets. In addition, a reputation system that is able to label nodes as trustful or suspicious is analyzed and evaluated via simulations. The proposed security mechanism has been implemented in the DESERT Underwater framework and a simulation study is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed solution against resource exhaustion and sinkhole attacks.

Underwater wireless sensor network(UWSN) is an emerging technology for exploring and research inside the ocean. Since it is somehow similar to the normal wireless network, which uses radio signals for communication purposes, while UWSN uses acoustic for communication between nodes inside the ocean and sink nodes. Due to unattended areas and the vulnerability of acoustic medium, UWNS are more prone to various malicious attacks like Sybil attack, Black-hole attack, Wormhole attack, etc. This paper analyzes blackhole attacks in UWSN and proposes an algorithm to mitigate blackhole attacks by forming clusters of nodes and selecting coordinator nodes from each cluster to identify the presence of blackholes in its cluster. We used public-key cryptography and the challenge-response method to authenticate and verify nodes.

Underwater networks have the potential to enable unexplored applications and to enhance our ability to observe and predict the ocean. Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) are often deployed in unprecedented and hostile waters and face many security threats. Applications based on UASNs such as coastal defense, pollution monitoring, assisted navigation to name a few, require secure communication. A new set of communication protocols and cooperative coordination algorithms have been proposed to enable collaborative monitoring tasks. However, such protocols overlook security as a key performance indicator. Spoofing, altering, or replaying routing information can affect the entire network, making UASN vulnerable to routing attacks such as selective forwarding, sinkhole attack, Sybil attack, acknowledgement spoofing and HELLO flood attack. The lack of security against such threats is startling if maintained that security is indeed an important requirement in many emerging civilian and military applications. In this work, we look at one of the most prevalent attacks among UASNs which is Sybill attack and discuss mitigation approaches for it. Then, feasibly implemented the attack in UnetStack3 to simulate real-life scenario.

With the increasing attention to ocean and the development of data-intensive sciences, a large amount of ocean data has been acquired by various observing platforms and sensors, which poses new challenges to data management and utilization. Typically, nowadays we target to move ocean data management toward the FAIR principles of being findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. However, the data produced and managed by different organizations with wide diversity, various structures and increasing volume make it hard to be FAIR, and one of the most critical reason is the lack of unified data representation and publication methods. In this paper, we propose novel techniques to try to solve the problem by introducing semantics with ontologies. Specifically, we first propose a unified semantic model named OEDO to represent ocean data by defining the concepts of ocean observing field, specifying the relations between the concepts, and describing the properties with ocean metadata. Then, we further optimize the state-of-the-art quick service query list (QSQL) data structure, by extending the domain concepts with WordNet to improve data discovery. Moreover, based on the OEDO model and the optimized QSQL, we propose an ocean data service publishing method called DOLP to improve data discovery and data access. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposals.

Security is one of the key aspects of underwater acoustic networks, due to the critical importance of the scenarios in which these networks can be employed. For example, attacks performed to military underwater networks or to assets deployed for tsunami prevention can lead to disastrous consequences. Nevertheless, countermeasures to possible network attacks have not been widely investigated so far. One way to identify possible attackers is by using reputation, where a node gains trust each time it exhibits a good behavior, and loses trust each time it behaves in a suspicious way. The first step for analyzing if a node is behaving in a good way is to inspect the network traffic, by detecting all conversations. This paper proposes both centralized and decentralized algorithms for performing this operation, either from the network or from the node perspective. While the former can be applied only in post processing, the latter can also be used in real time by each node, and so can be used for creating the trust value. To evaluate the algorithms, we used real experimental data acquired during the EDA RACUN project (Robust Underwater Communication in Underwater Networks).

A strong designated verifier signature (SDVS) scheme only permits an intended verifier to validate the signature by employing his/her private key. Meanwhile, for the sake of signer anonymity, the designated verifier is also able to generate a computationally indistinguishable transcript, which prevents the designated verifier from arbitrarily transferring his conviction to any third party. To extend the applications of conventional SDVS schemes, in this paper, we propose a group-oriented strong designated verifier signature (GO-SDVS) scheme from bilinear pairings. In particular, our scheme allows a group of signers to cooperatively generate a signature for a designated verifier. A significant property of our mechanism is constant-size signatures, i.e., the signature length remains constant when the number of involved signers increases. We also prove that the proposed GO-SDVS scheme is secure against adaptive chosen-message attacks in the random oracle model and fulfills the essential properties of signer ambiguity and non-transferability.

The past decade has seen a growing interest in underwater acoustic positioning networks (UAPNs) because of their wide applications in marine research, ocean monitoring, offshore exploration, and defense or homeland security. Efficient communication among all sensors and receivers is crucial so as to make positioning service available. Traditional UAPNs could locate only one target, that are growing obsolete due to increasing demands for multiple users working at the same time. Due to the demands for multiple users working simultaneously and narrow acoustic bandwidth, new efficient and reliable communication and networking protocols are required in design for UAPNs. In this paper, we aim to provide the procedure of communication design for UAPNs based on sonar equation and spread spectrum communication. What's more, signal design and performance analysis are supplied. The results show that the signal we designed have ideal correlation performance and high processing gain. The signal is suitable for multiple users UAPNs and thus show favorable potential in ocean engineering applications.

Computational Intelligence (CI) has a great potential in Security & Defense (S&D) applications. Nevertheless, such potential seems to be still under exploited. In this work we first review CI applications in the maritime domain, done in the past decades by NATO Nations. Then we discuss challenges and opportunities for CI in S&D. Finally we argue that a review of the academic training of military officers is highly recommendable, in order to allow them to understand, model and solve new problems, using CI techniques.

In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), secondary users (SUs) are vulnerable to malicious attacks because an SU node's opportunistic access cannot be protected from adversaries. How to design a channel hopping scheme to protect SU nodes from jamming attacks is thus an important issue in CRNs. Existing anti-jamming channel hopping schemes have some limitations: Some require SU nodes to exchange secrets in advance; some require an SU node to be either a receiver or a sender, and some are not flexible enough. Another issue for existing anti-jamming channel hopping schemes is that they do not consider different nodes may have different traffic loads. In this paper, we propose an anti-jamming channel hopping protocol, Load Awareness Anti-jamming channel hopping (LAA) scheme. Nodes running LAA are able to change their channel hopping sequences based on their sending and receiving traffic. Simulation results verify that LAA outperforms existing anti-jamming schemes.

This paper presents netsim, a combined software/hardware system for performing realtime realistic operation of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with acoustic modem telemetry in a virtual ocean environment. The design of the system is flexible to the choice of physical link hardware, allowing for the system to be tested against existing and new modems. Additionally, the virtual ocean channel simulator is designed to perform in real time by coupling less frequent asynchronous queries to high-fidelity models of the ocean environment and acoustic propagation with frequent pertubation-based updates for the exact position of the simulated AUVs. The results demonstrate the performance of this system using the WHOI Micro-Modem 2 hardware in the virtual ocean environment of the Arctic Beaufort Sea around 73 degrees latitude. The acoustic environment in this area has changed dramatically in recent years due to the changing climate.

The globalization of trade is due to the transportation possibilities and the standardization (containerization of freight). The dependency of the economy to the sea and to the merchant navy has increase this last decade. This process forms a worldwide maritime network between the different locations of production and consumption. This network, representing between 80 % and 90% of world traffic is a major economic concern, including freight distribution, raw materials or energy. Rodrigue demonstrates[1] the economic dependency of energy is increasing in the industrialized countries (North America, Europe, East Asia). The inter-regional trade of oil was 31 million bbl/day in 2002 and is expected to grow up to 57 bbl/day in 2030 [2]. Most of the international traffic use a maritime way, where may occur disruptions. For example, the Suez crisis (1956-1957) caused a closure of the canal, reducing the throughput capacity of transportation. This disruption cost a 2 millions of barrels lost per day. This article focuses on vulnerability of the energy supply, and proposes a methodology to formalize and assess the vulnerability of the network by taking into account the spatial structure of maritime territories.