A cooperative attack detection scheme for common control channel security in cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio (CR) is an intelligent technology designed to help secondary users (SUs) increase access opportunity for unused licensed spectrum channel while avoiding interference to the primary users (PUs). In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), SUs execute cooperative spectrum sensing to find available spectrum channels and exchange those sensed channels-related control information, namely available channels list (ACL) information, on common control channel (CCC) before determining when and in which data channels they may communicate. However, some SUs, defined as attackers, could cause security issue on the CCC by sharing false ACL information with other SUs benefit for their own utilization of the available spectrum channels, which significantly decreases the performance of the CRNs. In this paper, we propose an efficient detection scheme to identify attackers by cooperated SUs for CCC security. In the proposed scheme, all SUs exchange and share their control information on CCC with a reputation cooperate to identify attackers. The reputation of each SU is updated according to its own historical and recent behavior. Simulation results show that how to further improve the performance of the proposed scheme by choosing optimized thresholds. In addition, we also illustrate the proposed scheme can achieve a considerable performance improvement compared with a selfish attack detection technique (COOPON) for secure ACL information exchange on CCC.