Lightweight Privacy Preservation for Securing Large-Scale Database-Driven Cognitive Radio Networks with Location Verification

Abstract

The database-driven cognitive radio networks (CRNs) are regarded as a promising approach to utilizing limited spectrum resources in large-scale Internet of Things (IoT). However, database-driven CRNs face some security and privacy threats. Firstly, secondary users (SUs) should send identity and location information to the database (DB) to obtain a list of available channels, such that the curious DB might easily misuse and threaten the privacy of SUs. Secondly, malicious SUs might send fake location information to the DB in order to occupy channels with better quantity in advance and so gain benefits. This might also cause serious interference to primary users (PUs). In this paper, we propose a lightweight privacy-preserving location verification protocol to protect the identity and location privacy of each SU and to verify the location of SUs. In the proposed protocol, the SU does not need to provide location information to request an available channel from the DB. Therefore, the DB cannot get the location information of any SU. In the proposed protocol, the base station (BS) selects some SUs as witnesses to generate location proofs for each other in a distributed fashion. This new witness selection mechanism makes the proposed protocol reliable when a malicious SU generates fake location information to cheat the BS and also prevents SU-Witness collusion attacks. The results also show that the proposed protocol can provide strong privacy preservation for SUs and can effectively verify the location of the SUs. The security analysis shows that the proposed protocol can resist various types of attacks. Moreover, compared with previous protocols, the proposed protocol is lightweight because it relies on symmetric cryptography and it is unaffected by the area covered by the DB.

Privacy-Preserving Identifiers for IoT: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The database-driven cognitive radio networks are viewed as an approach to using limited spectrum resources in largescale IoT. Zhu et al [34] propose a lightweight privacypreserving location verification protocol for cognitive radio networks in which users don't need to provide their real identity and location information to the database and therefore, preventing the database from misusing the information.…”

“…(1) one global pseudonym per node based on global location information, connectivity information, device information; or (2) link-dependent pseudonyms in regard to each neighbor node based on a hash of linkdependent information (relative distance or relate clock drift with regard to a neighbour node). • Transaction Pseudonyms: This type of pseudonyms was leveraged the most by the surveyed papers [14], [19], [20], [29], [33], [34] for all identified application domains except for E-health. Both [29] & [20] use transaction pseudonyms for privacy-preserving authentication and authorisation of IoT devices.…”

“…Therefore, devices will be able to authenticate and as well as demonstrate their credentials in a privacy-preserving way. [34] presents a privacypreserving protocol for securing Large-Scale Database-Driven Cognitive Radio Networks with Location verification, with which a trusted authority (TA) will provide the user with multiple distinct pseudo-ids, which are each used for one channel request only. In [19] transaction pseudonyms are employed in VANETs especially in the message exchange between the vehicles where for each message that a vehicle wants to send a new dynamic pseudo-identity will be generated, while in [14] they were used in a completely decentralized manner where each time a node wants to authenticate with data collectors a new zero-knowledge proof token will be generated to provide full unlinkability.…”

“…Eleven publications [15], [16], [21], [22], [24], [27], [28], [31]- [34] propose solutions based on a central authority for issuing pseudonyms, i.e. they all include some sort of a centralized identity CA.…”

An Efficient Location Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for Cooperative Spectrum Sensing

“…• TP: The TP has strong computing power and sufficient storage and is authorized by the FCC [24]. In our system, the TP is responsible for generating system parameters and registering SUs.…”