IU-GUARD: Privacy-Preserving Spectrum Coordination for Incumbent Users under Dynamic Spectrum Sharing

TL;DR

IU-GUARD introduces a privacy-preserving framework for spectrum sharing that allows incumbent users to access spectrum without revealing their identities, using verifiable credentials and zero-knowledge proofs to enhance security and operational privacy.

Contribution

The paper presents IU-GUARD, a novel system combining VCs and ZKPs to protect incumbent user privacy in dynamic spectrum sharing, addressing limitations of existing methods.

Findings

Achieves strong privacy guarantees with practical overhead

Prototype demonstrates real-time applicability

Reduces risks of data leakage and interference

Abstract

With the growing demand for wireless spectrum, dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) frameworks such as the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) have emerged as practical solutions to improve utilization while protecting incumbent users (IUs) such as military radars. However, current incumbent protection mechanisms face critical limitations. The Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) requires costly sensor deployments and remains vulnerable to interference and security risks. Alternatively, the Incumbent Informing Capability (IIC) requires IUs to disclose their identities and operational parameters to the Spectrum Coordination System (SCS), creating linkable records that compromise operational privacy and mission secrecy. We propose IU-GUARD, a privacy-preserving spectrum sharing framework that enables IUs to access spectrum without revealing their identities. Leveraging verifiable credentials (VCs) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), IU-GUARD allows IUs to prove their authorization to the SCS while disclosing only essential operational parameters. This decouples IU identity from spectrum access, prevents cross-request linkage, and mitigates the risk of centralized SCS data leakage. We implement a prototype, and our evaluation shows that IU-GUARD achieves strong privacy guarantees with practical computation and communication overhead, making it suitable for real-time DSS deployment.