AUV-Aided Data Importance Based Scheme for Protecting Location Privacy in Smart Ocean

Abstract

Data collection in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) and the exposure of node location information pose a threat to the security of the entire network. Therefore, the main challenge for underwater acoustic sensor network security is to protect the security and privacy of the node locations. Compared to active attacks, the characteristics of passive attacks are indistinguishable. Therefore, this research focuses on passive attacks in underwater acoustic sensor networks, and an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV)-aided data-importance-based scheme for protecting location privacy (DIS-PLP) is proposed. The DIS-PLP comprises three main parts. First, the anchor node calculates the importance of the current data based on the historical dataset and decides whether to send data packets to the base station according to the importance result. Subsequently, an AUV privacy violation is defined, and an AUV path planning method is proposed to prevent attackers from tracking the AUV to obtain the location of the source node. Finally, to prevent nodes from waiting too long for AUVs, a secure multi-hop transmission method is proposed that uses fake source nodes to send fake source data packets to hide the real traffic. The simulation results show that the DIS-PLP offers well performance in terms of safety time and delay, which has strong practical significance for Smart Ocean to improve the level of network security.