Defense against spectrum sensing data falsification attacks in mobile ad hoc networks with cognitive radios
Fei Richard Yu, Helen Tang, Minyi Huang, Zhiqiang Li, Peter C. Mason · 2009
Cognitive radios (CRs) have been considered for use in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The area of security in Cognitive Radio MANETs (CR-MANETs) has yet to receive much attention. However, some distinct characteristics of CRs introduce new, non-trivial security risks to CR-MANETs. In this paper, we study spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attacks to CR-MANETs, in which intruders send false local spectrum sensing results in cooperative spectrum sensing, and SSDF may result in incorrect spectrum sensing decisions by CRs. We present a consensus-based cooperative spectrum sensing scheme to counter SSDF attacks in CR-MANETs. Our scheme is based on recent advances in consensus algorithms that have taken inspiration from self-organizing behavior of animal groups such as fish. Unlike the existing schemes, there is no need for a common receiver to do the data fusion for reaching the final decision to counter SSDF attacks. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.