Defending against Byzantine attack in cooperative spectrum sensing relying on a reliable reference

Abstract

This paper considers countermeasures against Byzantine attack, also known as spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack, which poses huge threats on the reliability of cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS). Due to lack of the ground-truth spectrum state, a reliable defense reference is vital to identify malicious behaviors and perform effective data fusion. Motivated by the fact that the existing references have strong assumptions such as the attackers are in minority or a trust node exists for data fusion, this paper proposes a novel defense reference which jointly exploits the cognitive process of spectrum sensing and spectrum access in a closed-loop manner, to provide the defense scheme with a solid basis. Then, based on the proposed reference, we design an optimal cooperative spectrum sensing scheme. Furthermore, numerical simulations verify the proposed scheme's favorable performance, even in critical cases that malicious sensors are in majority.