Securing Underwater Communications: Key Agreement based on Fully Hashed MQV

Abstract

This paper concerns the implementation and testing of a protocol that two honest parties can efficiently use to share a common secret session key. The protocol, based on the Fully Hashed Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (FHMQV) key agreement, is optimized to be used in underwater acoustic communications, thus enabling secure underwater acoustic networking. Our optimization is geared towards obtaining secure communications without affecting network performance by jointly keeping security-related overhead and energy consumption at bay. Implementation and testing experiments have been performed with the SUNSET SDCS framework and its SecFUN extension using as hardware two submerged acoustic modems. Results show that our approach imposes a low computational burden to the underwater node, which implies low local energy consumption. This is due to the fact the FHMQV protocol is highly efficient resulting in a small number of operations with a low computation cost. In addition the use of elliptic curves allows to further reduce the computational overhead.