A Survey of Security Issues in Cognitive Radio Networks

In the last decade,cognitive radio(CR) has emerged as a major next generation wireless networking technology,which is the most promising candidate solution to solve the spectrum scarcity and improve the spectrum utilization.However,there exist enormous challenges for the open and random access environment of CRNs,where the unlicensed secondary users(SUs) can use the channels that are not currently used by the licensed primary users(PUs) via spectrum-sensing technology.Because of this access method,some malicious users may access the cognitive network arbitrarily and launch some special attacks,such as primary user emulation attack,falsifying data or denial of service attack,which will cause serious damage to the cognitive radio network.In addition to the specifi c security threats of cognitive network,CRNs also face up to the conventional security threats,such as eavesdropping,tampering,imitation,forgery,and noncooperation etc..Hence,Cognitive radio networks have much more risks than traditional wireless networks with its special network model.In this paper,we considered the security threats from passive and active attacks.Firstly,the PHY layer security is presented in the view of passive attacks,and it is a compelling idea of using the physical properties of the radio channel to help provide secure wireless communications.Moreover,malicious user detection is introduced in the view of active attacks by means of the signal detection techniques to decrease the interference and the probabilities of false alarm and missed detection.Finally,we discuss the general countermeasures of security threats in three phases.In particular,we discuss the far reaching effect of defensive strategy against attacks in CRNs.

Guaranteeing Wireless Communication Secrecy via a WFRFT-Based Cooperative System

In this paper, a weighted fractional Fourier transform(WFRFT) based cooperative overlay system, aiming to guarantee physical layer(PHY) security, is proposed. The paper elaborates how WFRFT and physical layer properties of the wireless medium are collaborated to guarantee the secrecy of wireless transmissions. In the proposed system, WFRFT is first preform on the secret data, such that the transmitted signal is distorted and can only be neutralized by inverse-WFRFT with the same parameter. And then two streams of the transformed sequences that bearing different messages are cooperatively and simultaneously transmitted to two legitimate receivers via a beamforming-liked method, respectively. In general, both the rapid spatial decorrelation property and the inherent security features of WFRFT are leveraged, such that only the eavesdropper's is degraded, and hence, the wireless communication secrecy is reliably guaranteed. Numerical simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed system in terms of the average bit error rate and the secrecy capacity.