Conjoint trust assessment for secure communication in cognitive radio networks

With the rapid development of wireless communication, the growth of Cognitive Radio (CR) is increasing day by day. Because CR is flexible and operates on the wireless network, there are more security threats to CR technology than to the traditional radio environment. In addition, there is no comprehensive framework for achieving security in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs), and the role of trust for achieving security in CRNs has not been explored previously. Security vulnerability in cognitive radio technology is unavoidable due to the intrinsic nature of the technology, so it is critical to ensure system security in CRNs. The issue of secure communication in CRNs thus becomes more important than it is in conventional wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a conjoint trust assessment approach (combining trust assessment from the Primary User Network and the Secondary User Network) in a CRN to solve the security threats brought about by untrustworthy entities, such as selfish, malicious, and faultless nodes, and to ensure secure spectrum sharing in CRNs. A numerical analysis shows the feasibility of our proposed approach. Crown Copyright (c) 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.