Development of a Location-based Approach for Countering Primary User Emulation Attack in Cognitive Radio Network
Kushal Saharan, Sandeep Pathry, Pyari Mohan Pradhan · 2018
With the ever-increasing demand for wireless spectrum for various applications, the need for intelligent and efficient utilization of the limited resource has been felt tremendously in the last few years. Cognitive radio network (CRN) with its dynamic spectrum sharing techniques coupled with flexibility, reliability, awareness and adaptability offers a fitting solution. Unfortunately, this brings along myriads of threats and attacks specific to CRN. In this paper, a specific kind of attack called Primary User Emulation Attack (PUEA) by Selfish Secondary Users has been considered and various algorithms to counter this have been explored. In PUEA an adversary's CR transmits signals whose characteristics emulate those of the Primary User (PU). This paper focuses on location-based security algorithms to counter PUEA which include Distance Ratio Test (DRT) and Distance Difference Test (DDT) for transmitter verification. Certain modifications to DRT and DDT have been proposed to alleviate the inherent drawbacks of the techniques. This includes using a random configuration of the location verifiers (LVs) to counter an adversary trying positions equivalent to that of a PU. In light of certain shortcomings of this initial proposed approach, a superior DRT over DDT assortment algorithm is proposed. Also, an LV location optimization algorithm using genetic algorithm based on similarity index is designed to optimize the locations of the LVs.