Defense Management Mechanism for Primary User Emulation Attack Based on Evolutionary Game in Energy Harvesting Cognitive Industrial Internet of Things

Cognitive Industrial Internet of Things (CIIoT) permits Secondary Users (SUs) to use the spectrum bands owned by Primary Users (PUs) opportunistically. However, in the absence of the PUs, the selfish SUs could mislead the normal SUs to leave the spectrum bands by initiating a Primary User Emulation Attack (PUEA). In addition, the application of Energy Harvesting (EH) technology can exacerbate the threat of security. Because the energy cost of initiating a PUEA is offset to some extent by EH technology which can proactively replenish the energy of the selfish nodes. Thus, EH technology can increase the motivation of the selfish SUs to initiate a PUEA. To address the higher motivation of the selfish SUs attacking in CIIoT scenario where the EH technology is applied, in this paper, an EH-PUEA system model is first established to study the security countermeasures in this severe scenario of PUEA problems. Next, a new reward and punishment defense management mechanism is proposed, and then the dynamics of the selfish SUs and the normal SUs in a CIIoT network are studied based on Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), and the punishment parameter is adjusted according to the dynamics of the selfish SUs to reduce the proportion of the selfish SUs’ group choosing an attack strategy, so as to increase the throughput achieved by the normal SUs’ group. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed mechanism is superior to the conventional mechanism in terms of throughput achieved by the normal SUs’ group in CIIoT scenario with EH technology applied.