CoPD: a conjugate prior based detection scheme to countermeasure spectrum sensing data falsification attacks in cognitive radio networks

Abstract

Cognitive radio networks are a promising solution to the spectrum scarcity issue. In cognitive radio networks, cooperative spectrum sensing is critical to accurately detect the existence of a primary user (PU) signal, because the local spectrum sensing by a single secondary user (SU) has low reliability. Unfortunately, cooperative spectrum sensing is vulnerable to the spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack. Specifically, a malicious user can send a falsified sensing report to mislead other (benign) SUs to make an incorrect decision on the PU activity, to cause either denial of service to benign SUs or harmful interference to PUs. Therefore, detecting the SSDF attack is extremely important for robust cooperative spectrum sensing. This paper proposes a distributed defense scheme, termed conjugate prior based SSDF detection (CoPD), to countermeasure the SSDF attack. CoPD can effectively exclude the malicious sensing reports from SSDF attackers, so that benign SUs can effectively detect the PU activity. Furthermore, CoPD can also exclude abnormal sensing reports from ill-functioned SUs. Simulation results indicate that CoPD achieves very good performance to accomplish robust cooperative spectrum sensing.