Security Aspects of Policy Controlled Cognitive Radio

Cognitive radio technology envisions the coexistence of several primary and secondary systems in the same environment, where the secondary system actors must cooperate among each other to achieve the goal of higher spectrum utilization concurrently protecting the primary system. The nature of this type of networks makes them vulnerable to a variety of malicious attacks that can decrease the performance of the secondary and especially the primary system. This paper focuses on the security issues in policy controlled cognitive networks and identifies several security threats in terms of the main policy processes. The paper elaborates on the reflection of the security threats on the network behavior and performance and gives generic guidelines on how to protect from these attacks and alleviate their impact in the overall cognitive network performance. Furthermore, the paper describes the system model for a secure communication protocol to exchange the spectrum policies. The proposed model is analyzed and evaluated for two specific use-cases: opportunistic spectrum sharing in white spaces and prioritized spectrum sharing.