Cooperative Detection of PUE Attacks in CRNs

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) act as secondary users of the spectrum left unused by licensed services or primary users thus improving spectrum usage. However, the specific features of CRNs give rise to new security threats, such as the primary user emulation (PUE) attack, in which a malicious user impersonates a primary transmission to prevent the CRN from using a vacant band. With the aim of detecting such kind of attacks, in this chapter we describe a cooperative localization method specifically suited to CRNs. Localization is a powerful PUEdetection technique in several scenarios where the position of the primary users is well known, e.g. TV towers in IEEE 802.22 standard. Simulations results show the goodness of the proposed method and its suitability to typical CRN scenarios