The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoTs) and pervasive use of many different types of mobile computing devices make wireless communication spectrum a precious resource. In order to accommodate the still fast increasing number of devices requesting wireless connection, more efficient, fine-grained spectrum allocation and sharing schemes are badly in need. Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) have been widely recognized as one promising solution, in which the secondary users (SUs) are allowed to share channels with licensed primary users (PUs) as long as bringing no interference to the normal operations of the PUs. However, malicious attackers or selfish SUs may mimic the behavior of PUs to occupy the channels illegally. It is nontrivial to accurately, timely detect such kind of primary user emulation (PUE) attacks. In this paper, an efficient PUE attacked detection method is introduced leveraging the recurrent neural network (RNN). After a fundamental algorithm using basic RNN, an advanced version taking advantage of long-short-term-memory (LSTM) is proposed, which is more efficient on processing time series with long term memory. The experimental study has provided deeper insights about the different performances the RNNs achieved and validated the effectiveness of the proposed detectors.
Promising to significantly improve spectrum utilization, cognitive radio networks (CRNs) have attracted a great attention in the literature. Nevertheless, a new security threat known as the primary user emulation (PUE) attack raises a great challenge to CRNs. The PUE attack is unique to CRNs and can cause severe denial of service (DoS) to CRNs. In this paper, we propose a novel PUE detection system, termed Signal activity Pattern Acquisition and Reconstruction System . Different from current solutions of PUE detection, the proposed system does not need any a priori knowledge of primary users (PUs), and has no limitation on the type of PUs that are applicable. It acquires the activity pattern of a signal through spectrum sensing, such as the ON and OFF periods of the signal. Then it reconstructs the observed signal activity pattern through a reconstruction model. By examining the reconstruction error, the proposed system can smartly distinguish a signal activity pattern of a PU from a signal activity pattern of an attacker. Numerical results show that the proposed system has excellent performance in detecting PUE attacks.