Denial-of-Service Attacks on Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks

Cognitive radio technologies have emerged as a platform to solve the problem of spectrum scarcity for wireless applications since cognitive radios have the potential to utilize the idle licensed spectrum bands in an intelligent way without interfering with other licensed devices. However, most of the proposed protocols for opportunistic usage of the licensed spectrum bands assume that the participants involved in the protocols are honest and that there are no malicious adversaries that will attack the network. Using two examples, we demonstrate that in the presence of a malicious adversary the systems designed making these assumptions will fail to fulfill their goals of minimal disruption of the primary users and efficient utilization of the unused spectrum. We also briefly discuss some security design goals of the future cognitive DSA networks.