Title: Cooperative detection of primary user emulation attacks based on channel-tap power in mobile cognitive radio networks

Authors: Wen-Long Chin; Trong Nghia Le; Chun-Lin Tseng; Wei-Che Kao; Chun-Shen Tsai; Chun-Wei Kao

Addresses: Department of Engineering Science, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1, University Road, Tainan City 701, Taiwan ' Department of Engineering Science, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1, University Road, Tainan City 701, Taiwan ' Department of Engineering Science, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1, University Road, Tainan City 701, Taiwan ' Department of Engineering Science, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1, University Road, Tainan City 701, Taiwan ' Department of Engineering Science, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1, University Road, Tainan City 701, Taiwan ' Department of Engineering Science, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1, University Road, Tainan City 701, Taiwan

Abstract: This work proposes a new method for identifying a primary user emulation attack (PUEA) at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in mobile cognitive radio (CR) networks. Channel-tap power is utilised as a radio-frequency (RF) fingerprint to directly detect users via physical (PHY) layer. To improve the detection performance in fading channels, the cooperative detection schemes using the fixed sample size test (FSST) and the sequential probability ratio test (SPRT) are devised. From simulation results, for a mobile CR speed of 70 km/h, SNR = -5 dB and false alarm probability of 0.03, the FSST using 10 cooperative nodes can achieve the detection probability of 0.99, which is increased by 1.94 times that of the single Neyman-Pearson detector. When the SPRT is compared to the FSST, the SPRT only needs less than half of the detection time of the FSST to provide the same detection performance for all SNRs considered.

Keywords: channel-tap power; cognitive radio networks; cooperative detection; physical layer detection; PUEAs; primary user emulation attacks; mobile networks; low SNR; signal-to-noise ratio; detection performance; fading channels; simulation; network security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2014.061005

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2014 Vol.15 No.4, pp.263 - 274

Received: 28 Dec 2012
Accepted: 29 Jan 2013
Published online: 24 May 2014 *

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