Securing Cooperative Spectrum Sensing against Rational SSDF Attack in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is considered as a powerful approach to improve the utilization of scarce radio spectrum resources. However, most of CSS schemes assume all secondary users (SU) are honest, and thus offering opportunities for malicious SUs to launch the spectrum sensing data falsification attack (SSDF attack). To combat such misbehaved behaviors, recent efforts have been made to trust schemes. In this paper, we argue that powering CSS with traditional trust schemes is not enough. The rational SSDF attack is found in this paper. Unlike the simple SSDF attack, rational SSDF attackers send out false sensing data on a small number of interested primary users (PUs) rather than all PUs. In this case, rational SSDF attackers can keep up high trustworthiness, resulting in difficultly detecting malicious SUs in the traditional trust schemes. Meanwhile, a defense scheme using a novel trust approach is proposed to counter rational SSDF attack. Simulation results show that this scheme can successfully reduce the power of rational SSDF, and thus ensure the performance of CSS.