Thwarting Intelligent Malicious Behaviors in Cooperative Spectrum Sensing

Sensing falsification is a key security threat in cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks. Intelligent malicious users (IMUs) adjust their malicious behaviors according to their objectives and the network’s defense schemes. Without long-term collection of information on users’ reputation, the existing schemes fail to thwart such malicious behaviors. In this paper, we construct a joint spectrum sensing and access framework to thwart the malicious behaviors of both rational and irrational IMUs. Lack of reputation information makes the malicious behavior resistance degrade performance since the honest users may be misjudged as IMUs. Based on the moral hazard principal-agent model, we design an incentive compatible mechanism to provide a moderate punishment to IMUs. Our findings show that neither spectrum sensing nor spectrum access alone can prevent malicious behaviors without any information on users’ reputation. According to the different properties of malicious behavior resistance by spectrum sensing and spectrum access, we employ joint spectrum sensing and access to optimally prevent the IMUs sensing falsification. The proposed malicious behavior resistance mechanism is shown to achieve almost the same performance as the ideal case with truthful sensing.