Mitigating spectrum sensing data falsification attack in ad hoc cognitive radio networks

Abstract

SummaryIn a cognitive radio ad hoc network, there is no central authority. Hence, distributed collaborative spectrum sensing (CSS) plays a major role in achieving an accurate spectrum sensing result. However, CSS is sensitive to spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack, in which a malicious user falsifies its local sensing report before disseminating it into the network. To capture such abnormal behavior of a node, we present an approach for detecting SSDF attack based on dissimilarity score. A secondary user (SU) computes the dissimilarity score of its neighbors from the messages received from its h‐hop neighbors. Further, we also present how the proposed scheme can be used on the sequence of sensing reports to detect and isolate the malicious SUs on the fly.