  Security aspects in underwater wireless networks have not been widely
investigated so far, despite the critical importance of the scenarios in which
these networks can be employed. For example, an attack to a military underwater
network for enemy targeting or identification can lead to serious consequences.
Similarly, environmental monitoring applications such as tsunami prevention are
also critical from a public safety point of view. In this work, we assess a
scenario in which a malicious node tries to perform a jamming attack, degrading
the communication quality of battery-powered underwater nodes. The legitimate
transmitter may use packet level coding to increase the chances of correctly
delivering packets. Because of the energy limitation of the nodes, the jammer's
objective is twofold: disrupting the communication and reducing the lifetime of
the victim by making it send more redundancy. We model the jammer and the
transmitter as players in a multistage game, deriving the optimal strategies.
We evaluate the performance in a model-based scenario and using real
experimental data, performing a sensitivity analysis to evaluate the
performance of the strategies if the real channel model is different from the
one they use.
