Securing a distributed policy-based cognitive radio

  • Authors:

  • Jatin Thakkar;Daniel Ali;Jung-Min "Jerry" Park;Sangook Moon

  • Affiliations:

  • Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA;Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA;Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA;Mokwon University

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

Policy-based cognitive radios (CRs) contain policy conformance components that are responsible for assuring the conformance of the radio's transmission behavior to current active set of policies. The policy enforcer (PE) takes the central role in ensuring regulatory system policies of a CR. Several proposed architectures for CRs and software defined radios (SDRs) deploy the radio components as part of a distributed system using middleware such as CORBA. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of the requirements of a PE in a distributed system implementation. To this end, we describe a cache-based PE as part of a distributed CR system using a policy reasoner (PR) and CORBA middleware. We present a novel approach to maintain cache coherency using meta-policies from the PR. We also study the trade-off relationship between performance and security in distributed policy-based CR systems. We focus on vulnerabilities in the transport mechanism and the problem of implicit authorization. We discuss methods for securing policy-based CR systems using secure inter-object communications along with policy conformance components.