Byzantine Attack and Defense in Cognitive Radio Networks: A Survey

The Byzantine attack in cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS), also known as the spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack in the literature, is one of the key adversaries to the success of cognitive radio networks (CRNs). In the past couple of years, the research on the Byzantine attack and defense strategies has gained worldwide increasing attention. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey and tutorial on the recent advances in the Byzantine attack and defense for CSS in CRNs. Specifically, we first briefly present the preliminaries of CSS for general readers, including signal detection techniques, hypothesis testing, and data fusion. Second, we analyze the spear and shield relation between Byzantine attack and defense from three aspects: the vulnerability of CSS to attack, the obstacles in CSS to defense, and the games between attack and defense. Then, we propose a taxonomy of the existing Byzantine attack behaviors and elaborate on the corresponding attack parameters, which determine where, who, how, and when to launch attacks. Next, from the perspectives of homogeneous or heterogeneous scenarios, we classify the existing defense algorithms, and provide an in-depth tutorial on the state-of-the-art Byzantine defense schemes, commonly known as robust or secure CSS in the literature. Furthermore, we highlight the unsolved research challenges and depict the future research directions.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutoiral

Spectrum Sensing and Security Challenges and Solutions: Contemporary Affirmation of the Recent Literature

Cognitive radio (CR) has been recently proposed as a promising technology to improve spectrum utilization by enabling secondary access to unused licensed bands. A prerequisite to this secondary access is having no interference to the primary system. This requirement makes spectrum sensing a key function in cognitive radio systems. Among common spectrum sensing techniques, energy detection is an engaging method due to its simplicity and efficiency. However, the major disadvantage of energy detection is the hidden node problem, in which the sensing node cannot distinguish between an idle and a deeply faded or shadowed band. Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) which uses a distributed detection model has been considered to overcome that problem. On other dimension of this cooperative spectrum sensing, this is vulnerable to sensing data falsification attacks due to the distributed nature of cooperative spectrum sensing. As the goal of a sensing data falsification attack is to cause an incorrect decision on the presence/absence of a PU signal, malicious or compromised SUs may intentionally distort the measured RSSs and share them with other SUs. Then, the effect of erroneous sensing results propagates to the entire CRN. This type of attacks can be easily launched since the openness of programmable software defined radio (SDR) devices makes it easy for (malicious or compromised) SUs to access low layer protocol stacks, such as PHY and MAC. However, detecting such attacks is challenging due to the lack of coordination between PUs and SUs, and unpredictability in wireless channel signal propagation, thus calling for efficient mechanisms to protect CRNs. Here in this paper we attempt to perform contemporary affirmation of the recent literature of benchmarking strategies that enable the trusted and secure cooperative spectrum sensing among Cognitive Radios

A Study on Techniques/Algorithms used for Detection and Prevention of Security Attacks in Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper a detailed survey is carried out on the taxonomy of Security Issues, Advances on Security Threats and Countermeasures ,A Cross-Layer Attack, Security Status and Challenges for Cognitive Radio Networks, also a detailed survey on several Algorithms/Techniques used to detect and prevent SSDF(Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification) attack a type of DOS (Denial of Service) attack and several other  Network layer attacks in Cognitive Radio Network or Cognitive Radio Wireless Sensor Node Networks(WSNN’s) to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of those existing algorithms/techniques

Applications of Repeated Games in Wireless Networks: A Survey

A repeated game is an effective tool to model interactions and conflicts for players aiming to achieve their objectives in a long-term basis. Contrary to static noncooperative games that model an interaction among players in only one period, in repeated games, interactions of players repeat for multiple periods; and thus the players become aware of other players' past behaviors and their future benefits, and will adapt their behavior accordingly. In wireless networks, conflicts among wireless nodes can lead to selfish behaviors, resulting in poor network performances and detrimental individual payoffs. In this paper, we survey the applications of repeated games in different wireless networks. The main goal is to demonstrate the use of repeated games to encourage wireless nodes to cooperate, thereby improving network performances and avoiding network disruption due to selfish behaviors. Furthermore, various problems in wireless networks and variations of repeated game models together with the corresponding solutions are discussed in this survey. Finally, we outline some open issues and future research directions.Comment: 32 pages, 15 figures, 5 tables, 168 reference

Intelligent spectrum management techniques for wireless cognitive radio networks

PhD ThesisThis thesis addresses many of the unique spectrum management chal- lenges in CR networks for the rst time. These challenges have a vital e ect on the network performance and are particularly di cult to solve due to the unique characteristics of CR networks. Speci cally, this thesis proposes and investigates three intelligent spectrum management tech- niques for CR networks. The issues investigated in this thesis have a fundamental impact on the establishment, functionality and security of CR networks. First, an intelligent primary receiver-aware message exchange protocol for CR ad hoc networks is proposed. It considers the problem of alleviat- ing the interference collision risk to primary user communication, explic- itly to protect primary receivers that are not detected during spectrum sensing. The proposed protocol achieves a higher measure of safeguard- ing. A practical scenario is considered where no global network topology is known and no common control channel is assumed to exist. Second, a novel CR broadcast protocol (CRBP) to reliably disseminate the broadcast messages to all or most of the possible CR nodes in the network is proposed. The CRBP formulates the broadcast problem as a bipartite-graph problem. Thus, CRBP achieves a signi cant successful delivery ratio by connecting di erent local topologies, which is a unique feature in CR ad hoc networks. Finally, a new defence strategy to defend against spectrum sensing data falsi cation attacks in CR networks is proposed. In order to identify malicious users, the proposed scheme performs multiple veri cations of sensory data with the assistance of trusted nodes.Higher Committee For Education Devel- opment in Iraq (HCED-Iraq

Affirmed Crowd Sensor Selection based Cooperative Spectrum Sensing

The Cooperative Spectrum sensing model is gaining importance among the cognitive radio network sharing groups. While the crowd-sensing model (technically the cooperative spectrum sensing) model has positive developments, one of the critical challenges plaguing the model is the false or manipulated crowd sensor data, which results in implications for the secondary user’s network. Considering the efficacy of the spectrum sensing by crowd-sensing model, it is vital to address the issues of falsifications and manipulations, by focusing on the conditions of more accurate determination models. Concerning this, a method of avoiding falsified crowd sensors from the process of crowd sensors centric cooperative spectrum sensing has portrayed in this article. The proposal is a protocol that selects affirmed crowd sensor under diversified factors of the decision credibility about spectrum availability. An experimental study is a simulation approach that evincing the competency of the proposal compared to the other contemporary models available in recent literature

Decoupling trust and wireless channel induced effects on collaborative sensing attacks

One of the most crucial functionalities of cognitive radio networks is spectrum sensing. Completing this task in an accurate manner requires opportunistic spectrum access. Traditionally, sensing has been performed through energy detection by each individual secondary user. In order to increase accuracy, individual measurements are aggregated using different fusion functions. However, even though collaborative spectrum sensing can increase accuracy under benign settings, it is prone to falsification attacks, where malicious secondary users report fake sensings. Previous studies have designed trust (reputation) based systems to contain the effect of the adversaries, ignoring to a large extent the wireless channel irregularities when performing the computation. In this paper, we decouple the reasons behind an incorrect sensing report and propose the Decoupling Trust and Capability Spectrum Sensing System (DTCS3). DTCS3 is a collaborative spectrum sensing system that takes into account both a secondary sensor node's trust and its capability to sense the channel. Through thorough evaluations that consider a large variety of attack strategies, we show that by accounting for wireless induced effects while calculating the reporting trust of a secondary user, we can significantly improve the performance of a collaborative spectrum sensing system as compared to existing schemes in the literature. In particular, the true positive/negative rates can be improved by as much as 38%, while DTCS 3 is able to track and respond to dynamic changes in the adversaries' behavior. © 2014 IEEE