Green Cooperative Web of Trust for Security in Cognitive Radio Networks

Spectrum is a scarce and very essential resource for the ever growing mobile communication applications. Radio networks (CRN) is the best evolved solution towards spectrum scarcity. Cooperative spectrum sensing is a well-known and proven mechanism in the CRNs.As compared to other traditional wireless networks, CRNs are more delicate and open to the wireless environments due to their heterogeneous nature. Therefore, the CRNs have more security threats than the conventional wireless networks. The spectrum sensing and sharing mechanisms are inherently vulnerable to the malicious behaviors in the wireless networks due to its openness. This paper proposes an energy efficient lightweight cryptographic Cooperative web of trust (CWoT) for the spectrum sensing in CRNs which is proved to be appropriate for the resource constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Development of trust based authentication and authorization mechanism for the opportunistic large array (OLA) structured CRNs is the main objective of this paper. Received signal strength (RSS) values obtained can be utilized to avoid Primary user emulation attacks (PUEA) in CRNs.