Survey of Security threats and attacks in cognitive radio networks

Abstract

Number of technologies has been developed in wireless communication and there is always a common issue in this field i.e. ‘Security’ due to its open medium of communication. Now, spectrum allocation is becoming major problem in wireless communication due to paucity of available spectrum. Cognitive radio is one of the rapidly increasing technologies in wireless communication. Cognitive radio promises to detract spectrum shortage problem by allowing unlicensed users to co-exist with licensed users in spectrum band and use it for communication while causing no interference with licensed users. Cognitive radio technology intelligently detects vacant channels and allows unlicensed users to use that one, while avoiding occupied channels optimizing the use of available spectrum. Initially research in cognitive radios focused on resource allocation, spectrum sensing and management. Parallelly, another important issue that garnered attention of researchers from academia and industry is Security. Security considerations show that the unique characteristics of cognitive radio such as spectrum sensing and sharing make it vulnerable to new class of security threats and attacks. These security threats are challenge in the deployment of CRN and meeting Quality of Service (QoS). This is a survey paper in which we identified and discussed some of the security threats and attacks in spectrum sensing and cognitive radio networks. Together with discussing security attacks, we also proposed some techniques to mitigate the effectiveness of these attacks.