Anonymous Cluster-Based Source Location Protection in Underwater Pipeline Monitoring Operations

Abstract

Submarine pipelines are among the most efficient methods of marine oil transportation, and they are widely used in offshore oil exploitation. However, the complex environment of the ocean and malicious attackers may damage the pipeline. They can be efficiently monitored by deploying a multiplicity of sensor nodes, organized in <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">underwater acoustic sensor networks</i> (UASNs). UASNs is located near oil wells, so that UASNs can sense, broadcast, and receive data surveying the status of the submarine infrastructure timely. Inevitably, UASNs may experience security problems, owing to the open nature of the underwater environment. To address these security issues, this paper proposes a new source location privacy protection scheme based on an offshore oil acquisition platform. In the proposed scheme, the nodes are defined as pipeline and environment locations, and are allocated to different clusters. The concept of forming anonymous clusters by exchanging the identities of a source and a cluster head is introduced to determine fake confounding sources. In addition, a data fragmentation method is devised to reduce the energy consumption resulting from fake packet transmission. Particularly, we propose the deployment of disguised AUVs that collect data from fake sources, as to conceal and protect the location of the actual sources. Simulation results show that the safety time of the network is increased by about 6%. Due to the adoption of the data fragmentation method, the energy consumption of nodes is also decreased.