Attack Detection Scheme Against Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification on Common Control Channel in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio is an intelligent technology designed to help secondary users (SUs) increase their opportunity to access unused spectrum channels while avoiding interference with the primary users. In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), to find the available channels, SUs execute cooperative spectrum sensing and exchange channels-related control information, namely an available channels list (ACL), on a common control channel (CCC) before determining which channels they may transmit. However, some SUs, defined as attackers, could create a security issue by sharing false ACL information with other SUs to increase their own utilization of the available channels, which significantly decreases the performance of CRNs. In this paper, we propose an efficient detection scheme for CCC security to identify any attacker among the cooperating SUs. In the proposed scheme, all SUs share their ACL information on the CCC, with an associated reputation, which is updated according to its own behavior in each cooperation round, to cooperatively identify attackers. An attacker will be excluded from cooperating group with the result that its updated reputation value exceeds a certain threshold. Simulation results show how to further improve the performance of the proposed scheme by choosing optimized thresholds. In addition, we also illustrate that the proposed scheme can achieve considerable performance improvement compared with a attack detection technique COOPON for secure ACL information exchange.