Mitigating Primary Emulation Attacks in Multi-Channel Cognitive Radio Networks: A Surveillance Game

Duc-Tuyen Ta (1) , Nhan Nguyen-Thanh (1) , Patrick Maillé (2, 3, 4) , Philippe Ciblat (5) , van Tam Nguyen (6)

1 LTCI - Laboratoire Traitement et Communication de l'Information
2 RSM - Département Réseaux, Sécurité et Multimédia
3 IRISA-D2 - RÉSEAUX, TÉLÉCOMMUNICATION ET SERVICES
4 OCIF - Objets communicants pour l'Internet du futur
5 COMELEC - Département Communications & Electronique
6 EECS - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science [Berkeley]

—Primary User Emulation Attack (PUEA), in which attackers emulate primary user signals causing restriction of secondary access on the attacked channels, is a serious security problem in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs). An user performing a PUEA for selfishly occupying more channels is called a selfish PUEA attacker. Network managers could adopt a surveillance process on disallowed channels for identifying illegal channel occupation of selfish PUEA attackers and hence mitigating selfish PUEA. Determining surveillance strategies, particularly in multi-channel context, is necessary for ensuring network operation fairness. In this paper, we formulate a game, called multi-channel surveillance game, between the selfish attack and the surveillance process in multi-channel CRNs. The sequence-form representation method is adopted to determine the Nash Equilibrium (NE) of the game. We show that performing the obtained NE surveillance strategy significantly mitigates selfish PUEA.

Domains: Computer Science and Game Theory [cs.GT]; Networking and Internet Architecture [cs.NI]

Duc-Tuyen Ta, Nhan Nguyen-Thanh, Patrick Maillé, Philippe Ciblat, van Tam Nguyen. Mitigating Primary Emulation Attacks in Multi-Channel Cognitive Radio Networks: A Surveillance Game. GLOBECOM 2016 - 2016 IEEE Global Communications Conference, Dec 2016, Washington, United States. ⟨10.1109/GLOCOM.2016.7841989⟩. ⟨hal-01713280⟩