Detecting Primary User Emulation Attacks in Cognitive Radio Networks via Physical Layer Network Coding

Primary user emulation (PUE) attacks on cognitive radio networks pose a serious threat to the deployment of this technique. Previous approaches usually depend on individual or combined received signal strength (RSS) measurements to detect emulators. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism based on physical layer network coding to detect the emulators. When two signal sequences interfere at the receiver, the starting point of collision is determined by the distances among the receiver and the senders. Using the signal interference results at multiple receivers and the positions of reference senders, we can determine the position of the ‘claimed’ primary user. We can then compare this localization result with the known position of the primary user to detect the PUE attack. We design a PUE detection mechanism for wireless networks with trustworthy reference senders. We analyze the overhead of the proposed approach and study its detection accuracy through simulation. c © 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Z. Khan and N. Javaid.