Attack Prevention for Collaborative Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract: Collaborative spectrum sensing can significantly improve the detection performance of secondary unlicensed users (SUs). However, the performance of collaborative sensing is vulnerable to sensing data falsification attacks, where malicious SUs (attackers) submit manipulated sensing reports to mislead the fusion center's decision on spectrum occupancy. Moreover, attackers may not follow the fusion center's decision regarding their spectrum access. This paper considers a challenging attack scenario where multiple rational attackers overhear all honest SUs' sensing reports and cooperatively maximize attackers' aggregate spectrum utilization. We show that, without attack-prevention mechanisms, honest SUs are unable to transmit over the licensed spectrum, and they may further be penalized by the primary user for collisions due to attackers' aggressive transmissions. To prevent such attacks, we propose two novel attack-prevention mechanisms with direct and indirect punishments. The key idea is to identify collisions to the primary user that should not happen if all SUs follow the fusion center's decision. Unlike prior work, the proposed simple mechanisms do not require the fusion center to identify and exclude attackers. The direct punishment can effectively prevent all attackers from behaving maliciously. The indirect punishment is easier to implement and can prevent attacks when the attackers care enough about their long-term reward.