Abstract
The vast revolution in networking is increasing rapidly along with technology advancements, which requires more effort from all cyberspace professionals to cope with the challenges that come with advanced technology privileges and services. Hence, Cognitive Radio Network is one of the promising approaches that permit a dynamic type of smart network for improving the utilization of idle spectrum portions of wireless communications. However, it is vulnerable to security threats and attacks and demands security mechanisms to preserve and protect the cognitive radio networks for ensuring a secure communication environment. This paper presents an effective secure MAC protocol for cognitive radio networks, significantly enhancing the security level of the existing DSMCRN and SSMCRN protocols by eliminating the authentication server’s necessity, which can be a single point of failure to compromise the entire network communication. The proposed protocol has proven to be effective and reliable since it does not rely on a centralized entity for providing the required security for a single pair of cognitive users. The protocol also improves the performance in the context of fast switching to data channels leading to higher throughput is achieved compared to the benchmark protocols.
Highlights
Cognitive Radio (CR) [1] is an expedient technology that overcomes the shortage of spectrum usage in the current wireless networks [2,3,4]
This paper presents an effective secure Message Authentication Code (MAC) protocol for cognitive radio networks, significantly enhancing the security level of the existing Digital Signature-based Secure MAC Protocol for CRNs (DSMCRN) and Shared-Key Based Secure MAC Protocol for CRNs (SSMCRN) protocols by eliminating the authentication server’s necessity, which can be a single point of failure to compromise the entire network communication
In the control phase, where the improvement is performed in this work, the pair of involved Cognitive Users (CUs) in the communication will exchange the global parameters of the elliptic curve cryptography algorithm (ECC) to generate their own session key that will be used to encrypt the control information within the Free Channel List (FCL) and Selected Licensed Data Channels (SLDCH) frames instead of the server’s group shared key that is generated by the dedicated server in SSMCRN protocol
Summary
Cognitive Radio (CR) [1] is an expedient technology that overcomes the shortage of spectrum usage in the current wireless networks [2,3,4]. The main pioneering features of the CRNs are making it an innovative technology, features such as its ability to be cognitive and sorting to the spectrum, which presents active and practical access to the idle portions of the spectrum among PUs and CUs upon some features: adapting to the environment, capability to learn for example to evacuate the channel whenever the PU appears, observation, the ability to communicate in any technology environment, awareness regarding the white space areas, and modification inspection [6,11,12,13] These features offer a consistent connection between CUs in a practical way regarding the users' time of access and location. The proposed protocol provides a reliable and efficient cognitive radio environment upon the use of the ECC algorithm This aims to maintain the overall network and make it robust in the presence of any threat targeting the dedicated authentication server. This results in more security compared to the existing shared key produced by the authentication server to a pair of CUs in DSMCRN and SSMCRN protocols
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