Optimal Sensing Disruption for a Cognitive Radio Adversary

Spectrum sensing vulnerabilities in cognitive radio (CR) networks are being actively investigated, where most research focuses on mechanisms that deal with possible attacks without examining optimal sensing disruption strategies. This paper addresses the optimal design and analysis of a power-limited intelligent adversary to a CR network. The adversary targets unused bands and puts energy into them so that the number of unused bands appears reduced to secondary users. This is called sensing disruption. The optimal disruption strategy is obtained by maximizing the average number of false detections under the adversary's power constraint. It is shown that, for a CR network where energy detection is utilized by secondary users, the optimal sensing disruption strategy for noise spoofing for a CR adversary is equal-power partial-band spoofing. Numerical results and analyses of the optimal sensing disruption are provided.