An improved Merkle hash tree based secure scheme for bionic underwater acoustic communication

Recently, bionic signals have been used to achieve covert underwater acoustic communication (UWAC) with high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) over transmission systems. A high SNR allows the attackers to proceed with their mischievous goals and makes transmission systems vulnerable against malicious attacks. In this paper we propose an improved Merkle hash tree based secure scheme that can resist current underwater attacks, i.e., replay attack, fabricated message attack, message-altering attack, and analyst attack. Security analysis is performed to prove that the proposed scheme can resist these types of attacks. Performance evaluations show that the proposed scheme can meet UWAC limitations due to its efficiency regarding energy consumption, communication overhead, and computation cost.