A PHY-layer Authentication Approach for Transmitter Identification in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio (CR) was proposed as the key technologies to achieve the secondary usage of the spectrum. The security problems of CR networks have not been intensively studied, such as the primary user emulation (PUE) attacks. In this paper, we study the non-interactive security issues for wireless networks and propose a physical layer authentication approach to prevent PUE attacks in CR networks. We extract transmitter location fingerprints from the wireless medium in the multipath propagation environment. Wavelet transform is used to extract the characteristics of these fingerprints. Simulation and experiment results show that our approach can identify the PUE attackers and the legitimate primary users effectively.