PBAU: LIGHTWEIGHT PROVENANCE BASED NODE AUTHENTICATION FOR THE INTERNET OF UNDERWATER THINGS

Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are a core enabler of the Internet of Underwater Things, supporting environmental monitoring, marine exploration, offshore industry, and defense applications. However, the resource-constrained, energy-limited, and unattended nature of underwater deployment makes UWSNs highly vulnerable to node impersonation and data-injection attacks, while conventional authentication schemes based on key exchange impose additional communication rounds and cryptographic computation that drain the limited battery of sensor nodes. This paper proposes a lightweight Provenance-Based Authentication framework (PBAU) for UWSNs that authenticates sensor nodes from their historical behavior rather than cryptographic key exchange. The paper specifies the provenance record structure with hash-chained, sink-side storage requiring no material on sensor nodes; a complete per-packet authentication algorithm with O(1) time complexity and zero node-side cryptographic cost; and an energy analysis under a realistic underwater acoustic model incorporating Thorp absorption, spreading loss, transmission/reception energy, signal-to-noise ratio, and propagation delay, showing that eliminating the authentication round trip removes both a full acoustic propagation delay and the associated transmit/receive energy from every exchange.