Biblio

Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN) are opportunistic networks which aim to harness the white space in the television frequency spectrum, on a need-to-need basis, without interfering the incumbent, called the Primary User (PU). Cognitive radios (CR) that sense the spectrum periodically for sensing the PU activity, are called Secondary Users (SU). CRNs are susceptible to two major attacks, Byzantine attacks and Primary User Emulation Attack (PUEA). Both the attacks are capable of rendering a CRN useless, by either interfering with the PU itself or capturing the entire channel for themselves. Byzantine attacks detection and mitigation is an important security issue in CRN. Hence, the current work proposes using a multi-Hidden Markov Model system with an aim to detect different types of random-Byzantine attacks. Simulation results show good detection rate across all the attacks.

Cognitive radio is a promising technology that intends on solving the spectrum scarcity problem by allocating free spectrum dynamically to the unlicensed Secondary Users (SUs) in order to establish coexistence between the licensed Primary User (PU) & SUs, without causing any interference to the incumbent transmission. Primary user emulation attack (PUEA) is one such major threat posed on spectrum sensing, which decreases the spectrum access probability. Detection and defense against PUEA is realized using Yardstick based Threshold Allocation technique (YTA), by assigning threshold level to the base station thereby efficiently enhancing the spectrum sensing ability in a dynamic CR network. The simulation is performed using NS2 and analysis by using X-graph. The results shows minimum interference to primary transmissions by letting SUs spontaneously predict the prospective spectrum availability and aiding in effective prevention of potential emulation attacks along with proficient improvement of throughput in a dynamic cognitive radio environment.

With the improvement in technology and with the increase in the use of wireless devices there is deficiency of radio spectrum. Cognitive radio is considered as the solution for this problem. Cognitive radio is capable to detect which communication channels are in use and which are free, and immediately move into free channels while avoiding the used ones. This increases the usage of radio frequency spectrum. Any wireless system is prone to attack. Likewise, the main two attacks in the physical layer of cognitive radio are Primary User Emulation Attack (PUEA) and replay attack. This paper focusses on mitigating these two attacks with the aid of authentication tag and distance calculation. Mitigation of these attacks results in error free transmission which in turn fallouts in efficient dynamic spectrum access.

The primary objective of Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN) is to opportunistically utilize the available spectrum for efficient and seamless communication. Like all other radio networks, Cognitive Radio Network also suffers from a number of security attacks and Primary User Emulation Attack (PUEA) is vital among them. Primary user Emulation Attack not only degrades the performance of the Cognitive Radio Networks but also dissolve the objective of Cognitive Radio Network. Efficient and secure authentication of Primary Users (PU) is an only solution to mitigate Primary User Emulation Attack but most of the mechanisms designed for this are either complex or make changes to the spectrum. Here, we proposed a mechanism to authenticate Primary Users in Cognitive Radio Network which is neither complex nor make any changes to spectrum. The proposed mechanism is secure and also has improved the performance of the Cognitive Radio Network substantially.

Primary user emulation (PUE) attack causes security issues in a cognitive radio network (CRN) while sensing the unused spectrum. In PUE attack, malicious users transmit an emulated primary signal in spectrum sensing interval to secondary users (SUs) to forestall them from accessing the primary user (PU) spectrum bands. In the present paper, the defense against such attack by Neyman-Pearson criterion is shown in terms of total error probability. Impact of several parameters such as attacker strength, attacker's presence probability, and signal-to-noise ratio on SU is shown. Result shows proposed method protect the harmful effects of PUE attack in spectrum sensing.

With the rapid proliferation of mobile users, the spectrum scarcity has become one of the issues that have to be addressed. Cognitive Radio technology addresses this problem by allowing an opportunistic use of the spectrum bands. In cognitive radio networks, unlicensed users can use licensed channels without causing harmful interference to licensed users. However, cognitive radio networks can be subject to different security threats which can cause severe performance degradation. One of the main attacks on these networks is the primary user emulation in which a malicious node emulates the characteristics of the primary user signals. In this paper, we propose a detection technique of this attack based on the RSS-based localization with the maximum likelihood estimation. The simulation results show that the proposed technique outperforms the RSS-based localization method in detecting the primary user emulation attacker.