Mitigating primary emulation attacks in multi-channel cognitive radio networks: A surveillance game

Primary User Emulation Attack (PUEA), in which attackers emulate primary user signals causing restriction of secondary access on the attacked channels, is a serious security problem in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs). A user performing a PUEA for selfishly occupying more channels is called a selfish PUEA attacker. Network managers could adopt a surveillance process on disallowed channels for identifying illegal channel occupation of selfish PUEA attackers and hence mitigating selfish PUEA. Determining surveillance strategies, particularly in multi-channel context, is necessary for ensuring network operation fairness. In this paper, we formulate a game, called multi-channel surveillance game, between the selfish attack and the surveillance process in multi-channel CRNs. The sequence-form representation method is adopted to determine the Nash Equilibrium (NE) of the game. We show that performing the obtained NE surveillance strategy significantly mitigates selfish PUEA.