A Hybrid Hash-Encryption Scheme for Secure Transmission and Verification of Marine Scientific Research Data

Area of Science:

• Marine technology
• Data security
• Networked systems

Background:

• Marine scientific observation missions face challenges with disrupted, high-loss communication links.
• Maintaining data confidentiality and verifiability for heterogeneous sensor, image, and log data is crucial.
• Fragmented and out-of-order data delivery complicates secure data transmission.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose an end-to-end encryption-verification co-design for marine data.
• To ensure data confidentiality and integrity under challenging network conditions.
• To enable efficient data recovery and support intermittent connectivity.

Main Methods:

• Integration of HMR (Hybrid Multimodal Record) integrity structuring with EMR (Encrypted Multimodal Record) hybrid encapsulation.
• Externalizing block boundaries and maintaining minimal receiver-side verification state.
• Block-level integrity/provenance verification and selective recovery without continuous sessions.

Main Results:

• Reduced storage/encapsulation overhead (10.4% vs. 12.8%) and lower hashing latency (6.8 ms vs. 12.5 ms).
• Achieved 80.1 ms end-to-end encryption-decryption latency, 21.2% lower than RSA + AES.
• Demonstrated near-linear scaling of verification latency with block count (R² = 0.998) and minimal throughput drop under fragmentation.
• Transmission latency remained below 1.024 s in extreme channels with 100 KB blocks.
• Stable runtime slowdown (~3.40×) on resource-constrained Raspberry Pi 4.

Conclusions:

• The proposed co-design effectively addresses data security and integrity challenges in marine observation missions.
• The framework supports multi-hop and intermittent connectivity, enhancing operational flexibility.
• The solution is deployable on resource-constrained platforms, making it practical for field applications.