Spectrum sharing security and attacks in CRNs: a review

Cognitive Radio plays a major part in communication technology by resolving the shortage of the spectrum through usage of dynamic spectrum access and artificial intelligence characteristics. The element of spectrum sharing in cognitive radio is a fundament al approach in utilising free channels. Cooperatively communicating cognitive radio devices use the common control channel of the cognitive radio medium access control to achieve spectrum sharing. Thus, the common control channel and consequently spectrum sharing security are vital to ensuring security in the subsequent data communication among cognitive radio nodes. In addition to well known security problems in wireless networks, cognitive radio networks introduce new classes of security threats and challenges, such as licensed user emulation attacks in spectrum sensing and misbehaviours in the common control channel transactions, which degrade the overall network operation and performance. This review paper briefly presents the known threats and attacks in wireless networks before it looks into the concept of cognitive radio and its main functionality. The paper then mainly focuses on spectrum sharing security and its related challenges. Since spectrum sharing is enabled through usage of the common control channel, more attention is paid to the security of the common control channel by looking into its security threats as well as protection and detection mechanisms. Finally, the pros and cons as well as the comparisons of different CR - specific security mechanisms are presented with some open research issues and challenges

An identity-based key infrastructure suitable for messaging applications

Abstract—Identity-based encryption (IBE) systems are relatively recently proposed; yet they are highly popular for messaging applications since they offer new features such as certificateless infrastructure and anonymous communication. In this paper, we intended to propose an IBE infrastructure for messaging applications. The proposed infrastructure requires one registration authority and at least one public key generator and they secret share the master secret key. In addition, the PKG also shares the same master secret with each user in the system in a different way. Therefore, the PKG will never be able to learn the private keys of users under non-collusion assumption. We discuss different aspects of the proposed infrastructure such as security, key revocation, uniqueness of the identities that constitute the main drawbacks of other IBE schemes. We demonstrate that our infrastructure solves many of these drawbacks under certain assumptions

An Elliptic Curve-based Signcryption Scheme with Forward Secrecy

An elliptic curve-based signcryption scheme is introduced in this paper that effectively combines the functionalities of digital signature and encryption, and decreases the computational costs and communication overheads in comparison with the traditional signature-then-encryption schemes. It simultaneously provides the attributes of message confidentiality, authentication, integrity, unforgeability, non-repudiation, public verifiability, and forward secrecy of message confidentiality. Since it is based on elliptic curves and can use any fast and secure symmetric algorithm for encrypting messages, it has great advantages to be used for security establishments in store-and-forward applications and when dealing with resource-constrained devices.Comment: 13 Pages, 5 Figures, 2 Table