With the increasing emphasis on safeguarding maritime sovereignty and developing marine resources, the security of underwater acoustic communication has risen to a new level of importance. Given the complex environmental challenges faced by underwater acoustic channels, this paper proposes an NTRU-based key encapsulation scheme designed to ensure secure and reliable underwater data transmission, while maintaining privacy and integrity. In the public–private key pair generation phase, a ring sampling technique is employed to generate a compact NTRU trapdoor, which not only guarantees security but also effectively reduces the communication overhead. During the encapsulation phase, underwater acoustic channel characteristics during communication are introduced as temporary identity information to ensure the confidentiality and reliability of the key encapsulation mechanism. Furthermore, the traditional key encapsulation mechanism is extended by integrating a digital signature process, where the encapsulated ciphertext is signed. The use of digital signature technology verifies the authenticity and integrity of the transmitted data, ensuring that communication data remain secure and unaltered in complex underwater acoustic environments. Finally, we conduct a rigorous correctness analysis and security proofs, demonstrating that the proposed scheme achieves chosen ciphertext security, while meeting the demands of low bandwidth and limited computational capacity in underwater acoustic communication.
With the increasing emphasis on safeguarding maritime sovereignty and developing marine resources, the security of underwater acoustic communication has risen to a new level of importance. Given the complex environmental challenges faced by underwater acoustic channels, this paper proposes an NTRU-based key encapsulation scheme designed to ensure secure and reliable underwater data transmission, while maintaining privacy and integrity. In the public–private key pair generation phase, a ring sampling technique is employed to generate a compact NTRU trapdoor, which not only guarantees security but also effectively reduces the communication overhead. During the encapsulation phase, underwater acoustic channel characteristics during communication are introduced as temporary identity information to ensure the confidentiality and reliability of the key encapsulation mechanism. Furthermore, the traditional key encapsulation mechanism is extended by integrating a digital signature process, where the encapsulated ciphertext is signed. The use of digital signature technology verifies the authenticity and integrity of the transmitted data, ensuring that communication data remain secure and unaltered in complex underwater acoustic environments. Finally, we conduct a rigorous correctness analysis and security proofs, demonstrating that the proposed scheme achieves chosen ciphertext security, while meeting the demands of low bandwidth and limited computational capacity in underwater acoustic communication.
Underwater acoustic communications have found applications in many fields with great developments. Thus, the demand for security of such communications is rapidly growing. Two parties in the communication, after authentication, generally use a secure symmetric key to encrypt all the data they transmit. Thus, an efficient key generation algorithm is in urgent need to guarding the privacy of the communication data. This paper presents a novel key generation system which is easy to be implemented, efficient in computation and communication, and robust to the spatio-temporal variable ocean environments. Unlike those conventional solutions, by exploiting reciprocity, deep fades, randomness extractor and robust secure fuzzy information reconciliators, which is first introduced by us in this paper, channel characteristics are used to generate the key in our solution.
Underwater acoustic communication (UAC) is getting more and more attention in ocean exploration. In order to solve the problem of key transmission and secure communication in UAC environment, we propose a quantum computation-resistant multi-party Blinded Key Encapsulation Mechanism (BKEM), coined as Sea-BKEM. In Sea-BKEM, an orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) based key generation algorithm is proposed to reduce the complexity of key generation by extracting random narrow distributions from the ocean noise in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain using the number theoretic transform (NTT) and symplectic finite Fourier transform (SFFT), and generating the encapsulation and decapsulation keys. On the NTRU lattice, the ciphertext obtained from the signal block computation is compressed, and the ciphertext is blinded using ocean noise factor in OTFS to reduce the ciphertext expansion and communication cost. On this basis, the indistinguishable security and rigidity of the Sea-BKEM scheme are proven in the DD domain of OTFS. Experimental results show that Sea-BKEM outperforms the existing lattice-based schemes in terms of computational cost, communication cost and bit error rate (BER).
Secure underwater communication is vital for maritime operations; however, acoustic channels pose significant challenges, including limited bandwidth, high latency, and complex propagation effects. With quantum computing threatening classical methods, there is a need for cryptographic schemes that can withstand quantum attacks. This study presents a quantum-resistant underwater communication system that integrates CRYSTALS-Kyber for key encapsulation, SPHINCS+ for digital signature authentication, and AES for efficient payload encryption. The proposed system is evaluated under realistic underwater channel simulations that account for propagation delay, multipath fading, and Doppler effects. Experimental benchmarks reveal that while post-quantum operations, such as CRYSTALS-Kyber key encapsulation (2.41-4.91ms) and SPHINCS+ signing (96.10ms) exhibit higher latencies compared to classical ECC/ECDSA methods, these latencies remain within acceptable limits given the substantial security advantages they offer. This approach bridges the gap between rigorous quantum-resistant security and practical underwater deployment, establishing a robust foundation for future enhancements in error correction and adaptive network strategies.
Underwater communication (UWC) systems are critical for maritime exploration, environmental monitoring, and defense, yet their security remains vulnerable to quantum computing threats. Recent studies estimate that 65% of underwater infrastructure relies on classical cryptographic protocols, which could be compromised by quantum algorithms within the next decade. Existing solutions, such as ECC-based authentication and lightweight symmetric cryptography, lack scalability, quantum resistance, or resilience against adversarial attacks in highlatency underwater environments. To address this gap, this study proposes a Post-Quantum Authentication Protocol integrating NTRU lattice-based encryption and the Falcon hash function, designed to resist quantum attacks while operating efficiently in resource-constrained UWC networks. The proposed protocol leverages NTRU's hardness assumptions over truncated polynomial rings and Falcon's collision-resistant hashing to ensure mutual authentication, integrity, and confidentiality. Comparative analysis with prior works demonstrates a 40% reduction in communication overhead and 35% faster encryption/decryption cycles, validated through simulations on underwater acoustic modems. This work establishes a robust framework for securing UWC systems against both classical and quantum threats.
Security is a crucial aspect of underwater acoustic networks, that are often used in mission critical scenarios, such as coastal surveillance, rapid environmental assessment and mine countermeasure applications. The broadcast nature of the acoustic channel makes it vulnerable to a variety of attacks, such as spoofing, men-in-the-middle and jamming. Moreover, the lack of a standardized key distribution system makes data confidentiality challenging. In this paper we investigate the use of quantum key distribution (QKD) in underwater networks, in order to ensure confidentiality and integrity of the communication. While in the terrestrial domain the use of the one-time-pad protocol (requiring the key length to be equal to the message length) is limited by the low rate of the QKD rate compared to the bitrate of radio transmissions, in the underwater domain the limited bandwidth of the acoustic channel makes QKD a valid approach also for the one-time-pad protocol. The system is tested both with an emulator and a field test: results show that QKD can be a valuable system to secure underwater acoustic networks.
Although the current lattice-based ring signcryption scheme resists quantum attacks,it has large key storage and high encryption/decryption time.The linkable lattice ring signcryption scheme not only can protect signer anonymity,but also can determine whether two signatures are generated by the same signer.Thus,based on the compact Gaussian sampling algorithm and rejection sampling technique,the identity-based linkable ring signcryption scheme is constructed on the NTRU lattice.Firstly,the system master key is generated using the trapdoor generation algorithm on the NTRU lattice.Then private keys of ring members are obtained based on the compact Gaussian sampling algorithm.Finally,the user signature is generated using rejection sampling,and the key encapsulation mechanism encrypts the signature.Security proof in the random oracle model (ROM) that DRLWE and NTRU small integer solutions are difficult to solve ensures confidentiality,unforgeability,unconditional anonymity,and linkability.Performance analysis shows that compared to the lattice-based ring signcryption and linkable ring signature schemes on NTRU,the proposed scheme has a smaller public key and lower encryption/decryption cost,greatly improving efficiency.