## 1 Introduction  
The ocean, as a new frontier of overall national security, plays a more prominent role in safeguarding national sovereignty, security, and development interests. More and more countries pay attention to the monitoring of the marine environment by utilizing underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) for scientific exploration, commercial development, military applications, etc. [1, 2]. Source location privacy protection in UASNs is at the forefront of contemporary research due to its critical role in ensuring the security and integrity of underwater communication systems [3]. These networks consist of a large number of underwater sensor nodes that collect and transmit critical information. However, the precise location of these sensor nodes is sensitive information, and its exposure may lead to security threats such as adversarial tracking, resource targeting, and privacy breaches [4]. Therefore, ensuring reliable source location privacy protection in UASNs is critical [5]. When protecting source location privacy in UASNs, traditional encryption and authentication techniques usually ignore the strategic interaction and competition between network nodes, which may lead to failure to consider the strategic actions that attackers may take, thus reducing the effectiveness of privacy protection [6]. In addition, UASNsemploy acoustic communication [7; 8], and the underwater environment presents unique challenges such as limited bandwidth, high propagation latency, and dynamic network topologies, which require innovative and customized source location privacy protection schemes, rather than simply applying technologies from terrestrial networks to underwater environments. In this particular context, solutions must be developed for the needs and limitations of underwater acoustic sensor networks to ensure that privacy protection does not sacrifice network performance and availability. Hence, developing mechanisms based on methods such as game theory to account for competition and cooperation between nodes is essential for increasing the level of source location privacy [9; 10]. In regard to source location privacy protection in UASNs, it is necessary to consider three main problems: source location privacy, latency and energy [11]. Among them, safeguarding the location privacy of source nodes is the paramount issue in UASNs. In underwater acoustic sensor networks, attackers can deduce a source node's location by analyzing acoustic signals [12]. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt privacy protection mechanisms, such as false source technology and multi-path routing, to reduce the possibility of attackers obtaining location information [13]. However, these mechanisms introduce problems of latency and energy consumption. Latency is another key factor to be balanced in UASNs. Excessive communication latency is unacceptable in real-time or interactive applications. Introducing source location privacy protection mechanisms may increase communication latency as additional processing steps take time. Therefore, the relationship between location privacy protection and communication latency needs to be balanced to meet the latency requirements of specific applications. Sensor nodes in UASNs usually rely on limited battery power [14]. Balancing between energy efficiency and location privacy protection is essential because location privacy protection mechanisms could introduce additional energy overhead in UASNs [15]. In this paper, a source location privacy protection scheme (SLP-MACGT) based on game theory is proposed to protect the location privacy of sensor nodes in multi-attacker cooperation scenarios by exploring the application of source location privacy challenges in depth. Through this study, a new perspective and solution for source location privacy protection in underwater acoustic networks are provided to meet the growing security needs. The main contributions of this paper are summarized as follows:  
* Establish a multi-attacker model.