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.