Mitigating Smart Primary User Emulation Attackers in Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

The wireless telecommunication spectrum scarcity and over-crowding of the free ISM (Industrial Scientific Medical) band has led to the development of many pioneering technologies and one such technology is the Cognitive Radio Network (CRN). A CRN comprising of secondary users (SU) or unlicensed uses, aims to opportunistically use a spectrum whenever it is not being used by the licensed user, also called the primary user (PU). However, CRN is susceptible to many security issues among which the Primary User Emulation Attack (PUEA) and the Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification (SSDF) attacks are very common. A lot of research has been done to mitigate these attacks. However, recently, a new variant of the PUEA attack, called Smart PUEA (SPUEA), has been studied and very less work has been done on mitigating this attack. The current work proposes two independent methods, based on RK-AES encryption and k-Means++ clustering, respectively, to detect and mitigate SPUEA. The results show successful mitigation of an otherwise devastating attack.