Surveillance Strategies Against Primary User Emulation Attack in Cognitive Radio Networks

We investigate the primary user emulation (PUE) attack, which is a serious security problem in cognitive radio (CR) networks. There exist three types of PUE attackers: 1) a selfish one, which aims at maximizing its selfish usage of channel resource; 2) a malicious one, which points for obstructing the operation of CR network; and 3) a mixed one, which is between a selfish and malicious PUE attacker. For combating a selfish PUE attacker, a channel surveillance process has to be implemented in order to determine active user's identification and so selfish PUE attacker. An extra-sensing process has to be implemented for observing new opportunities to access the channel and so for mitigating the malicious PUE attacker's effect. Relevant strategies for deploying the above processes are obtained through a game theory-based analysis and the exhibition of Nash equilibrium (NE). We show the NE strongly depends on the network demand, the availability of the spectrum resource, and the type of the attacker.