Primary user emulation attack (PUEA) is a denial of service (DoS) attack unique to dynamic spectrum access (DSA) networks. While there have been studies in the literature to detect and mitigate PUEA, the impact of PUEA on the performance of secondary networks has seldom been studied. In this paper, we analyze how PUEA affects call dropping and delay in secondary networks carrying both real-time traffic and non-real-time traffic. Numerical results indicate that PUEA can increase the number of dropped calls by up to two orders of magnitude and can increase the mean delay by up to a factor larger than two. We then evaluate the performance of secondary networks that deploy the protocols which we proposed previously to mitigate PUEA. Our protocols reduce the number of dropped calls by up to one order of magnitude. Our protocols are also shown to exhibit almost the same delay performance as that of a system with no PUEA, for low malicious traffic load. When malicious traffic load is high, our protocols provide an improvement on the delay performance by up to 54%.

We propose a spectrum decision protocol resilient to primary user emulation attacks (PUEA) in dynamic spectrum access networks. PUEA is a type of denial-of-service attack that can severely interfere with the spectrum sensing process and unfairly deprive legitimate secondary users of spectrum access. In this paper, we present a robust spectrum decision protocol that can mitigate PUEA using individual spectrum decisions made by secondary nodes in the network. In order to enable each secondary node to make an individual spectrum decision to detect PUEA, we first characterize the received power at good secondary user. This is done by using a flexible log-normal sum approximation. The received power thus characterized is used to determine the probability of successful PUEA on each secondary user, which is used to develop the proposed protocol. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol can significantly reduce the probability of successful PUEA under Byzantine attacks (i.e., when the malicious users intentionally provide false spectrum decisions), while still following the spectrum evacuation etiquette.

Primary user emulation attack (PUEA) is a denial of service (DoS) attack unique to dynamic spectrum access (DSA) networks. While there have been studies in the literature to detect and mitigate PUEA, the impact of PUEA on the call blocking and call dropping probabilities of users in secondary networks has not been studied. We present the first analysis to study the impact of PUEA on the secondary users in terms of call blocking and call dropping. We propose a three dimensional continuous time Markov chain (3D-CTMC) to model the channel occupancy in DSA networks. We use the 3D-CTMC to determine the call blocking and call dropping probabilities for secondary users. We validate our analysis with simulations. Results indicate that while PUEA does not affect the call blocking probability, it can increase the call dropping probability of secondary users by more than one order of magnitude. We also evaluate the call dropping performance of some of our previously proposed protocols to mitigate PUEA. We show that our protocols can improve the call dropping performance by about 40% for high traffic loads of malicious users and can provide almost the same performance as that of a system with no PUEA, when the malicious user traffic is low.

In this paper, we present an analytical model as well as a practical mechanism to detect denial of service (DoS) attacks on secondary users in dynamic spectrum access (DSA) networks. In particular, we analyze primary user emulation attacks (PUEA) in cognitive radio networks without using any location information and therefore can do away with dedicated sensor networks. We present an analysis using Fenton's approximation and Wald's sequential probability ratio test (WSPRT) to detect PUEA. Simulation results demonstrate that it is possible to keep the probability of success of PUEA low, while still keeping the probability of missing the return of the primary low as well.