Channel-Based Detection of Primary User Emulation Attacks in Cognitive Radios

Abstract

Recently, cognitive radio (CR) has recently emerged as a useful technology to improve the efficiency of spectrum utilization. However, wireless networks are accompanied with an important security flaw that they are much easier to be attacked than any wired network. Many security issues are discovered. Within which, the most important one is primary user emulation attack (PUEA). In this work, we propose a method by using the characteristics of wireless channels to identify the PUEA. In the wireless environment, the statistical property of the wireless channel between the receiver and transmitter is unique; therefore, we can use this feature as a radio fingerprint. By employing the capability of spectrum sensing in CR, we can identify primary user emulation attackers via the uniqueness of wireless channels. Compared with conventional security schemes based on higher layer protocols, whose information must be passed to the upper layers, the proposed scheme using physical layer is more efficient in terms of the detection time. Simulations confirm the advantages of the proposed scheme.