Security in Cognitive Radio Networks Security in Cognitive Radio Networks

While bringing the potential for 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 out mainly from the two important capabilities implemented within CRs: their cognition ability and reconfigurability. This chapter will focus on identifying, presenting and classifying the main potential security attacks and vulnerabilities, as well as proposing appropriate counter-measures and solutions for them. These will be 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 will be used to demonstrate the practicability of the potential implementation of the proposed countermeasures and solutions for the discussed security problems and issues. Security in Cognitive Radio Networks