Spatiotemporal diversification by moving-target defense through benign employment of false-data injection for dynamic, secure cognitive radio network

Abstract

The future of wireless technology struggles to cope with information and resource exchange among different users over various systems. Given the latest advances in Cognitive Radio (CR) networks, and Software Defined Radio (SDR), spectrum resources are shared between Primary Users (PU) and Secondary Users (SU) by enabling frequency hopping through dynamic reconfiguration of active frequency bands. The elasticity and dynamic re-programmability offered by that merge opened the doors for transformative evolutions towards more secure and reliable wireless communication. In this paper, we exploit such unique features to present a novel Moving-target defense technique enabling multidimensional spatiotemporal diversification of the SU's traffic to obfuscate signal transmission-patterns, and the transmitted data across the entire spectrum. Such obfuscation extremely complicates malicious signal traceability and eavesdropping. In time, we benignly inject false data into the communication stream to conceal the real data among the false. In space, we employ dynamic prioritized manipulations of the active frequency over time, hopping between all the frequencies available for the secondary user to access. Simulation results showed that for a powerful malicious user with multiple access points, and no pre-knowledge of the diversification patterns used by the system, it is very complicated to eavesdrop a meaningful portion of the signal or the data stream.