Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) is an emerging technology for exploration of underwater resources. Security plays an important role in the UWSNs environment because the environment of UWSNs is prone to different security attacks. This research proposes SEECR: Secure Energy Efficient and Cooperative Routing protocol for UWSNs. SEECR comprised of energy efficient and strong defense mechanism for combatting attacks in underwater environment. SEECR exploits cooperative routing for enhancing the performance of network. Considering the resource constrained UWSNs environment minimum computation is employed for implementing security so that SEECR remains suitable for underwater environment. In order to evaluate the performance of SEECR, this research compares the performance of SEECR with AMCTD: Adaptive Mobility of Courier Nodes in Threshold-optimized DBR - a well-known routing protocol for UWSNs environment. The performance of SEECR and AMCTD protocols are evaluated using different performance evaluation parameters such as number of alive nodes, transmission loss, throughput, energy tax and end-to-end delay. The results suggest an improved performance of SEECR over AMCTD. SEECR shows an improvement of 9% in terms of number of alive nodes, over 50% reduction in terms of transmission loss, up to 9% increase in throughput, up to 23% reduction in energy tax, and 25% reduction in end-to-end delay. Further, we observe that attack significantly degrades the performance of AMCTD whereas due to the embedded defense mechanism in SEECR the impact of attack is negligible.

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) are comprised of sensor nodes that are deployed under the water having limited battery power and other limited resources. Applications of UWSNs include monitoring the quality of the water, mine detection, environment monitoring, military surveillance, disaster prediction, and underwater navigation. UWSNs are more vulnerable to security attacks as compared to their counterparts such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The possible attacks in UWSNs can abrupt the operation of entire network. This research work presents the analysis of relevant research done on security-based schemes in UWSNs. The security-based schemes are categorized into five sub-categories. Each technique in each category is analyzed in detail. The major contribution in each security-based scheme along with technique used, possible future research issues and implementation tool are discussed in detail. The open research issues and future trends identified and presented in this research can be further explored by the research community.

The exponentially growing concern of cyber-attacks on extremely dense underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) and the evolution of UWSNs digital threat landscape has brought novel research challenges and issues. Primarily, varied protocol evaluation under advanced persistent threats is now becoming indispensable yet very challenging. This research implements an active attack in the Adaptive Mobility of Courier Nodes in Threshold-optimized Depth-based Routing (AMCTD) protocol. A variety of attacker nodes were employed in diverse scenarios to thoroughly assess the performance of AMCTD protocol. The protocol was exhaustively evaluated both with and without active attacks with benchmark evaluation metrics such as end-to-end delay, throughput, transmission loss, number of active nodes and energy tax. The preliminary research findings show that active attack drastically lowers the AMCTD protocol’s performance (i.e., active attack reduces the number of active nodes by up to 10%, reduces throughput by up to 6%, increases transmission loss by 7%, raises energy tax by 25%, and increases end-to-end delay by 20%).

A challenged network is one where traditional hypotheses such as reduced data transfer error rates, end‐to‐end connectivity, or short transmissions have not gained much significance. A wide range of application scenarios are associated with such networks. Delay tolerant networking (DTN) is an approach that pursues to report the problems which reduce communication in disrupted networks. DTN works on store‐carry and forward mechanism in such a way that a message may be stored by a node for a comparatively large amount of time and carry it until a proper forwarding opportunity appears. To store a message for long delays, a proper buffer management scheme is required to select a message for dropping upon buffer overflow. Every time dropping messages lead towards the wastage of valuable resources which the message has already consumed. The proposed solution is a size‐based policy which determines an inception size for the selection of message for deletion as buffer becomes overflow. The basic theme behind this scheme is that by determining the exact buffer space requirement, one can easily select a message of an appropriate size to be discarded. By doing so, it can overcome unnecessary message drop and ignores biasness just before selection of specific sized message. The proposed scheme Spontaneous Size Drop (SS‐Drop) implies a simple but intelligent mechanism to determine the inception size to drop a message upon overflow of the buffer. After simulation in ONE (Opportunistic Network Environment) simulator, the SS‐Drop outperforms the opponent drop policies in terms of high delivery ratio by giving 66.3% delivery probability value and minimizes the overhead ratio up to 41.25%. SS‐Drop also showed a prominent reduction in dropping of messages and buffer time average.

Digital divide means unequal access to the people for information and communication technology (ICT) facilities. The developed countries are comparatively less digitally divided as compared to developing countries. This study focuses on District Chitral considering its geographical conditions and high mountainous topography which plays a significant role in its isolation. Aside from the digital divide, the situation in Chitral is even more severe in terms of the absence of basic ICT infrastructure and electricity in the schools. To address this issue, especially in female secondary and higher secondary schools, we designed a project to bridge the digital divide via Wireless Local Area Network on Raspberry Pi3 for balancing the ICT facilities in the targeted area. The Wi‐Fi‐Based Content Distributors (Wi‐Fi‐BCDs) were provided to bridge the digital divide in rural area schools of Chitral. The Wi‐Fi‐BCD is a solar‐based system that is used to deliver quality educational contents directly to classroom, library, or other learning environments without electricity connection and Internet wire as these facilities are available by default in it. The close‐ended questionnaire was adopted to collect data from the students, teachers, and headmistresses of girl secondary and higher secondary schools in Chitral. The procedure of validity, reliability, regression, correlation, and exploratory factor analysis was used to analyze the obtained data. The technology acceptance model (TAM) was modified and adopted to examine the effects of Wi‐Fi‐BCD for bridging the digital divide. The relationship of the modified TAM model was examined through regression and correlation to verify the model fitness according to the data obtained. The result analysis of this study shows that the relationship of the modified TAM model with its variables is positively significant, while the analysis of path relationship between model variables and outcomes from the questionnaire shows that it motivates learners to use Wi‐Fi‐BCD.

The recent rise in Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart homes has introduced new security risks, particularly due to resource constraints in IoT devices, which make it challenging to design efficient security solutions. Current authentication schemes are vulnerable to various security attacks, including replay, man-in-the-middle, and impersonation attacks; lack forward secrecy; and exhibit high computational and communication complexity. To address these issues, this paper presents a secure and efficient authentication scheme tailored to IoT-based smart home surveillance networks. The proposed scheme employs Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), SHA-256 hashing, and XOR operations to achieve mutual authentication and establish session keys between mobile devices, gateway nodes, and sensor nodes. The security analysis, conducted using the Random Oracle Model and ProVerif, confirms that the proposed scheme is secure against various attacks. The performance analysis carried out on a heterogeneous testbed reveals that the proposed protocol has low computation cost (1.15 ms), small communication overhead (6784 bits), optimal storage requirement (576 bytes), and low energy consumption (1.67 mJ per session), which makes it highly appropriate for resource-limited IoT networks. The proposed scheme achieves a good trade-off between security and efficiency, offering a viable solution for secure smart-home surveillance.