Underwater wireless communication networks are particularly vulnerable to malicious attacks due to high bit error rates, large and variable propagation returns, and low bandwidth of acoustic channels. The unique characteristics of the underwater communication channel and the differences between submarine sensor networks and their terrestrial equivalents require the development of efficient and reliable safety mechanisms. This article presents a complete security survey for UWCNs and describes the research challenges for secure communication in this environment. Wireless communication networks (UWCNs) include sensors and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that interact to perform specific applications such as Underwater Monitoring. Coordination and the exchange of information between sensors and AUVs make the provision of safety a challenge.

The unique characteristics of the underwater acoustic channel and the differences between such networks and their terrestrial counterparts require the development of efficient and reliable safety mechanisms. The aquatic environment is particularly vulnerable to malicious attacks due to high bit error rates, large and variable propagation delay, low bandwidth of acoustic channels in water. The achievement of reliable inter-vehicle and sensor-AUV communication is particularly difficult due to the mobility of AUVs and the movement of sensors with water currents. The aforementioned features of UWCNs have several security issues associated with packet errors, eavesdropping, packet modification, and many more. In addition, since the energy consumption in submarine communications is greater than in terrestrial radio communications, the attacks of energy exhaustion can reduce the useful life of the network.

The different possible attacks are jams, wormholes, selective forwarding, Sybil attacks, etc. Defenses for these are discussed. Jam can be overcome by scatter spectrum techniques, worm detection is done with a visual modeling using Dis-VoW and other attacks can be countered by authentication, verification, and collocation. Open research challenges for safe location, routing and time synchronization are mentioned. This document discusses UWCNs, with emphasis on possible attacks, countermeasures and new opportunities and development possibilities in this direction to improve the security of such networks.