Abstract—Cognitive Radio (CR) is a novel technology that promises to solve the lack of spectrum by allowing secondary users to use licensed band, so that they can coexist with primary users without causing interference to their communications. With the development of CR, extending to the level of network, cognitive radio networks (CRNs) emerge as the times require. Nowadays the operational aspects of CRN are being explored vigorously, and several potential security challenges for cognitive radio have gained lots of attention. In this paper, we explore the security issues on physical layer for cognitive radio networks. First, we give a brief overview of the CRNs, then we review several existing secure threats to the physical layer in CRNs and we propose a new kind of security problem. Next, we discuss the related countermeasures on how to defend against these attacks. Subsequently, we conduct an evaluation of these countermeasures, and make some future works for secure CRNs. At last, we make the conclusion.

Index Terms—Cognitive radio networks, physical layer, security threats, countermeasures against attacks, primary users’ location attack

Cite: Yi-cheng Yu, Liang Hu, Hong-tu Li, Yuan-mo Zhang, Fang-ming Wu, and Jian-feng Chu, "The Security of Physical Layer in Cognitive Radio Networks," Journal of Communications, vol. 9, no. 12, pp. 916-922, 2014. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.9.12.916-922