Non-interactive Identity-Based Underwater Data Transmission with Anonymity and Zero Knowledge

Due to the lack of security infrastructures for underwater wireless communications among vehicles, data transmission protocols typically use identity-based cryptography for protecting transmitted data. However, current identity-based cryptographic schemes transmit vehicles' real identities along with the messages, which makes the communication schemes vulnerable to attacks. For example, the adversaries can infer real identities of the vehicles and thus collect important information about underwater vehicles, track them, and thus be in an advantageous position to attack them. In addition, during data transmission, adversaries can count the number of underwater vehicles that are communicating and thus evaluate the enemy's scale of operations. At the same time, due to the complex underwater environment, transmitted messages can be easily lost. Therefore, non-interactive data transmission schemes that ensure the underwater vehicles do not transmit additional messages for authentication and key establishment are needed. To address these needs, we present two novel non-interactive identity-based data transmission protocols. Similar to the protocols in this field, our protocols provide integrity and confidentiality protections for transmitted messages. However, as opposed to the other well-known approaches, our protocols do not expose information of vehicles' real identities and use different identities for transmitting each message. By doing so, our protocols provide protection against adversaries' collection of information about underwater vehicles. Moreover, in our protocols, underwater vehicles can transmit messages directly, without previously sending authentication and key establishment messages, thus achieving the non-interactivity goal. In addition, one of our protocol even permits vehicles transmitting messages without knowing any information about each other. Therefore, we posit that our protocols are quite suitable for transmitting messages for underwater environment. Experimental results show that the proposed protocols are feasible for real-world applications.