Preserving operational information in spectrum access system with dishonest users

© 2017 IEEE. Privacy has been regarded as one of the most critical issues in light of promoting the development of centralized spectrum management, hence attracting wide attention. However, researchers in the current literature are usually protecting users' privacy based on the assumption that all users are honest, which is reasonable but not practical. In this paper, we investigate the privacy issue among different tiers of users in the centralized spectrum access system (SAS), mainly focusing on honest Priority Access Licenses (PALs) and dishonest General Authorized Accesses (GAAs). To that end, we propose an authentication scheme to prevent GAAs from using other users' information by the aid of a public key cryptosystem. Moreover, we propose a "punishment and forgiveness" scheme, which draws support from GAAs' reputation stores (RSs) and reputation histories (RHs), to encourage GAAs to engage in positive and true activities. Besides, we propose a privacy preservation scheme cooperating with the "punishment and forgiveness" scheme (PS-PFS) in order to effectively mitigate the impact of dishonest users while fully preserving all users' privacy as well as successfully realizing spectrum sharing