Managing sensing and cooperation to analyze PUE attacks in cognitive radio ad hoc networks

In Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks (CRAHNs), malicious Secondary Users can exploit CR (Cognitive Radio) capabilities to perform Primary User Emulation Attacks (PUEA). These attacks pretend the transmission of a Primary User (PU), giving to malicious users the priority of using licensed frequencies over well-behaved unlicensed Secondary Users (SU). Since CRAHNs are envisioned as a solution for the frequency spectrum underutilization, PUEA is a threat, compromising these networks operation and easily resulting in Denial of Services (DoS). While the state of the art has focused on evolving architectural design issues (i.e. centralized non-cooperative to decentralized cooperative schemes) another key design aspect was left behind: the decision criterion, which is typically assumed as unique metric (e.g. the received signal power). To fill this gap, we propose INCA, a novel multIple criteria scheme for the deceNtralized and Cooperative Analysis of the PUEA presence in CRAHNs. INCA follows two phases. On the first, each SU employs multiple criteria to define a hypothesis about the potential existence of attacks; whereas on the second, these hypotheses are exchanged among neighbors, and each SU employs the Bayes theorem to calculate the final probability of a PUEA. Simulation results show the improvement and effectiveness of the multi-criteria approach.