While potentially solving the spectrum underutilization problem using methods such as dynamic and opportunistic spectrum access, Cognitive Radios (CRs) also bring a set of security issues and potential breaches that have to be addressed. These issues come from the two important capabilities implemented within CRs: their cognition ability and reconfigurability. This chapter focuses on identifying, presenting, and classifying the main potential security attacks and vulnerabilities, as well as proposing appropriate counter-measures and solutions for them. These are supplemented by simulation results and metrics, with the intention of estimating the efficiency of each of the observed attacks and its counter-measure. The presented simulations are performed in the proprietary C/C++ and Matlab/Simulink simulators. nSHIELD is a major ongoing European embedded systems security-related project, which is used to demonstrate the practicability of the potential implementation of the proposed countermeasures and solutions for the discussed security problems and issues.
Opportunistic spectrum access for mobile cognitive radios