An enhanced authentication protocol for WRANs in TV white space
Cong Wang, Maode Ma, Zenghua Zhao · Security and Communication Networks · 2015
Cognitive radio technique has been recognized as an effective solution to the dilemma introduced by the rapid growth of wireless communications and the scarcity of spectrum resources. One example of the cognitive radio systems is the wireless regional area network operating in television white space TVWS spectrum, which has been specified by IEEE 802.22 standard. The wireless regional area networks in TVWS face not only the traditional security threats but also cognitive security challenges. Especially, the authentication between the base station and the customer premises equipment is vital for secure communication. We discovered that the authentication protocol specified in IEEE 802.22 is vulnerable to the interleaving attacks and cannot achieve mutual key confirmation. In this paper, an Enhanced Certificate-based Authentication scheme ECA has been proposed to overcome the vulnerability of the authentication scheme in IEEE 802.22 standard with much less requirements on the computation and communication resources. The drawbacks of the authentication protocol in IEEE 802.22 standard has been explored followed by the presentation of the proposed enhanced authentication protocol, ECA. The ECA protocol has been evaluated in terms of security functionality and the performance. The correctness of the Enhanced Certificate-based Authentication scheme is analyzed by the Burrows, Abadi, and Needham logic. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.