Mitigating selfish primary user emulation attacks in multi-channel cognitive radio networks: A surveillance game

TL;DR

This paper models a game-theoretic approach to detect and mitigate selfish primary user emulation attacks in multi-channel cognitive radio networks, ensuring fair access and security.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-channel surveillance game model and uses sequence-form representation to find Nash Equilibrium strategies for attack mitigation.

Findings

NE surveillance strategies effectively reduce selfish PUEA

Game-theoretic approach enhances network security

Surveillance strategies improve channel access fairness

Abstract

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.