An Underwater Secure Localization Scheme Based on Physical Layer Cryptographic Learning

In open underwater environments, ensuring accurate positions of sensors while protecting private information of localization systems presents a significant challenge. The physical channel differences between terrestrial and underwater networks render most existing privacy protection schemes designed for terrestrial networks inapplicable underwater. Moreover, limited research on underwater privacy protection has led to high implementation complexity and communication expenses. In this paper, to reduce the complexity of privacy protection, a secure mobile localization scheme using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) as anchors is proposed for underwater sensor networks, based on adversarial neural cryptography utilizing acoustic channel features. Depending on whether eavesdroppers show interest in keys, two adversarial cryptography models are proposed to protect transmission of legitimate localization information and to actively counter eavesdroppers with learning capabilities in real time. Furthermore, to obtain effective keys and minimize unnecessary key transmission, random physical layer channel features are dynamically utilized as real-time keys for the cryptography system, and a synchronous channel probing protocol is designed for key generation. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that, compared to other approaches, the proposed secure localization scheme effectively prevents the leakage of position information and maintains localization accuracy while operating at lower implementation complexity and communication expenses.