Supporting secure spectrum sensing data transmission against SSDH attack in cognitive radio ad hoc networks

Abstract

Cognitive radio ad hoc networks are commonly perceived as ideal ad hoc environments where cognitive radio technology enables secondary users (SUs) to utilize scarce spectrum resources in a dynamic manner. Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is the key function of cognitive radio technology to identify the available spectrum. However, the nature of aggregating data makes CSS offer opportunities for malicious SUs. Recently, a lot of efforts have been paid to combating spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) threat, but little attention to the multi-hop architecture of cognitive radio ad hoc networks. In this paper, we report the discovery of a novel attack called spectrum sensing data hijack (SSDH), in which attackers disguise as routers to hijack and tamper with spectrum sensing data during the transmission. Our simulations show that this new attack needs much less cost to manipulate CSS and has a much higher success rate compared with SSDF attack. We conduct an in-depth investigation on SSDH and propose a two-level defense scheme from the design ideas of IBC signature-verification and neighbor monitor. We also perform simulations to validate our approach. The results show that our defense scheme can significantly reduce the SSDH attack success ratio.