Agents for Agents: An Interrogator-Based Secure Framework for Autonomous Internet of Underwater Things

TL;DR

This paper introduces an interrogator-based framework using lightweight transformers and blockchain to dynamically monitor and manage trust among underwater autonomous agents, enhancing security and coordination.

Contribution

It presents a novel passive trust monitoring system with blockchain integration for underwater multi-agent networks, improving detection accuracy and maintaining scalability.

Findings

21.7% improvement in detection accuracy over static trust baselines

Low energy overhead for trust evaluation and management

Behavior-driven validation enhances underwater agent coordination

Abstract

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and sensor nodes increasingly support decentralized sensing and coordination in the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT), yet most deployments rely on static trust once authentication is established, leaving long-duration missions vulnerable to compromised or behaviorally deviating agents. In this paper, an interrogator based structure is presented that incorporates the idea of behavioral trust monitoring into underwater multi-agent operation without interfering with autonomy. Privileged interrogator module is a passive communication metadata analyzer that uses a lightweight transformer model to calculate dynamic trust scores, which are used to authorize the forwarding of mission critical data. Suspicious agents cause proportional monitoring and conditional restrictions, which allow fast containment and maintain network continuity. The evidence of trust is stored in a permissioned blockchain consortium which offers identity management which is not tampered and is decentralized without causing the overhead of public consensus mechanisms. Simulation based analysis shows that the evaluation of the result compares to a relative improvement of 21.7% in the detection accuracy compared to the static trust baselines with limited energy overhead. These findings suggest that behavior driven validation has the capability of reinforcing underwater coordination without compromising scalability and deployment.