Towards Security Issues and Solutions in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio technology is the vision of pervasive wireless communications that improves the spectrum utilization and offers many social and individual benefits. The objective of the cognitive radio network technology is to use the unutilized spectrum by primary users and fulfill the secondary users’ demands irrespective of time and location (any time and any place). Due to their flexibility, the Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) are vulnerable to numerous threats and security problems that will affect the performance of the network. Little attention has been given to security aspects in cognitive radio networks. In this chapter, the authors discuss the security issues in cognitive radio networks, and then they present an intensive list of the main known security threats in CRN at various layers and the adverse effects on performance due to such threats, and the current existing paradigms to mitigate such issues and threats. Finally, the authors highlight proposed directions in order to make CRN more authenticated, reliable, and secure.