Disruptive Attacks on Video Tactical Cognitive Radio Downlinks

Abstract

We consider video transmission over a mobile cognitive radio (CR) system operating in a hostile environment where an intelligent adversary tries to disrupt communications. We investigate the optimal strategy for spoofing, desynchronizing, and jamming a cluster-based CR network with a Gaussian noise signal over a slow Rayleigh fading channel. The adversary can limit access for secondary users (SUs) by either transmitting a spoofing signal in the sensing interval, or a desynchronizing signal in the code acquisition interval. By jamming the network during the transmission interval, the adversary can reduce the rate of successful transmission. We show how the adversary can optimally allocate its energy across subcarriers during sensing, code acquisition, and transmission intervals. We determine a worst-case optimal energy allocation for spoofing, desynchronizing, and jamming, which gives an upper bound to the received video distortion of SUs. We also propose cross-layer resource allocation algorithms and evaluate their performance under disruptive attacks.

Optimal Sensing Disruption: A Generalized Framework for a Power-Limited Adversary

“…Optimal spoofing for an adversary with a limited power budget under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) was derived and analyzed in [11], [23], and [24]. This work was extended for fading propagation environments in [25] and [26]. However, it was assumed that the adversary knows spectral usage status perfectly.…”

“…That is,ñ S = n S . Substituting (26) into (20), the formulation of the proposed spoofing reduces to…”