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An Adaptive Primary User Emulation Attack Detection Mechanism for Cognitive Radio Networks

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Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2018)

Abstract

The proliferation of advanced information technologies (IT), especially the wide spread of Internet of Things (IoTs) makes wireless spectrum a precious resource. Cognitive radio network (CRN) has been recognized as the key to achieve efficient utility of communication bands. Because of the great difficulty, high complexity and regulations in dynamic spectrum access (DSA), it is very challenging to protect CRNs from malicious attackers or selfish abusers. Primary user emulation (PUE) attacks is one type of easy-to-launch but hard-to-detect attacks in CRNs that malicious entities mimic PU signals in order to either occupy spectrum resource selfishly or conduct Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Inspired by the physical features widely used as the fingerprint of variant electronic devices, an adaptive and realistic PUE attack detection technique is proposed in this paper. It leverages the PU transmission features that attackers are not able to mimic. In this work, the transmission power is selected as one of the hard-to-mimic features due to the intrinsic discrepancy between PUs and attackers, while considering constraints in real implementations. Our experimental results verified the effectiveness and correctness of the proposed mechanism.

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Acknowledgement

Q. Dong, Y. Chen and X. Li are supported by the NSF via grant CNS-1443885. K. Zeng is partially supported by the NSF under grant No. CNS-1502584 and CNS-1464487.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, 13902, USA

    Qi Dong, Yu Chen & Xiaohua Li

  2. Volgenau School of Engineering, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Kai Zeng

  3. School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117417, Singapore

    Roger Zimmermann

Authors
  1. Qi Dong
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  2. Yu Chen
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  3. Xiaohua Li
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  4. Kai Zeng
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  5. Roger Zimmermann
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qi Dong .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Klaus Advanced Computing Building, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Raheem Beyah

  2. Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore

    Bing Chang

  3. School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore

    Yingjiu Li

  4. Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Sencun Zhu

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© 2018 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Dong, Q., Chen, Y., Li, X., Zeng, K., Zimmermann, R. (2018). An Adaptive Primary User Emulation Attack Detection Mechanism for Cognitive Radio Networks. In: Beyah, R., Chang, B., Li, Y., Zhu, S. (eds) Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2018. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 254. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01701-9_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01701-9_17

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01700-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01701-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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