Uncooperative Localization Improves Attack Performance in Underwater Acoustic Networks

Underwa ter Acoustic Networks (UANs) have become a focus of interest for emerging scientific research and military applications. Recent work has shown that performance of existing security attacks are sensitive to network topology. In this paper, we utilize the mobility of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to discover the topology of UANs by monitoring the broadcast patterns of geographic routing protocols. In this way, a mobile attacker can take advantage ofthe geographic information used in UANs to improve attack performance. We evaluate our approach in Aqua-Sim and results show that attack performance of jamming is significantly improved. Index Terms-Underwater Acoustic Networks, Localization, Security, Network Discovery