Security in Cognitive Radio Networks

While potentially solving the spectrum underutilization problem using methods such as dynamic and opportunistic spectrum access, Cognitive Radios (CRs) also bring a set of security issues and potential breaches that have to be addressed. These issues come from the two important capabilities implemented within CRs: their cognition ability and reconfigurability. This chapter focuses on identifying, presenting, and classifying the main potential security attacks and vulnerabilities, as well as proposing appropriate counter-measures and solutions for them. These are supplemented by simulation results and metrics, with the intention of estimating the efficiency of each of the observed attacks and its counter-measure. The presented simulations are performed in the proprietary C/C++ and Matlab/Simulink simulators. nSHIELD is a major ongoing European embedded systems security-related project, which is used to demonstrate the practicability of the potential implementation of the proposed countermeasures and solutions for the discussed security problems and issues.