Digital Signatures for Centralized DSA Networks

Abstract

Abstract-Over the past few years there has been a growing demand for radio resources and at the same time these resources are under utilized due to static spectrum allocation techniques. Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) has been thought of as a solution that would satisfy both the growing demand for radio resources and to efficiently utilize the spectrum. The radio devices that have the capability to dynamically sense the spectrum and access the under utilized bands are called cognitive radios (CR). There are two broad classes of users in CR, the primary user is a licensed user of a particular radio frequency band and the secondary users are unlicensed users who cognitively operate without causing harmful interference to the primary user.In this paper we consider a denial attack on centralized DSA networks where a malicious secondary user masquerades as a primary user and effectively shuts off access to all other secondary users. Note that this problem is unique to CR due to the distinction between primary and secondary users. We propose a public key cryptography based primary user identification mechanism that prevents malicious secondary users from masquerading as primary users. We show that the proposed identification mechanism and the associated key management are computationally light weight. We also discuss some advantages and limitations of the proposed identification mechanism.

Spectrum Sharing Security and Attacks in CRNs: a Review

“…Their approaches involve the activities of a CA, PUs, and both PUs' and SUs' base stations. However, the main differences of these mechanisms are that the BSs are connected to the CA using wire links in [15], while in the [99] approach, an asymmetric key scheme instead of a CA is mainly used.…”

“…Incorporating these security features can lead to the exchange of complete and reliable secure MAC frames among cognitive users [9,13,94]. Thus, several studies have been conducted for secure MAC protocols in CRNs [11,[14][15][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101]. They are classified into two categories, based on protection and detection techniques for addressing the security requirements and to defend the existing security issues in MAC protocols in CRNs.…”

“…In [11,15,99] proposed different protection systems based on applying a digital signatures for protecting the network from DoS attacks and providing secure communication. Their approaches involve the activities of a CA, PUs, and both PUs' and SUs' base stations.…”

“…In general, a number of researchers [11,15,[94][95][96][97][99][100] have made efforts to address the security requirements and provide secure communication among SUs by applying different security mechanisms, such as authentication and authorisation access by different techniques, within a CRN. Their proposed procedures include digital signatures, certification authority (CA), and trust-based third parties entities like server and base stations.…”

Enhanced robust cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio

“…An Overlapping attack [2] will harm another CR network if two CR networks overlap. In the MAC layer, the asynchronous sensing attack [3] can disturb normal sensing operation by purposefully transmitting in a sensing period. In cooperative spectrum sensing, to examine the existence of the primary user, a node takes its neighbors' sensing results as a reference in addition to its own sensing.…”