Analysis of coordinated denial-of-service attacks in IEEE 802.22 networks

The cognitive radio enabled IEEE 802.22 wireless regional area network (WRAN) is designed to opportunistically utilize the unused or under-utilized TV bands. However, due to the open nature of cognitive radio networks and lack of proactive security protocols, the IEEE 802.22 networks are vulnerable to various denial-of-service (DoS) threats. In this paper, we study coordinated DoS attacks on IEEE 802.22 networks from the malicious users' perspective. We consider both one-stage and a multi-stage cases of the problem. In the one-stage scenario, we formulate a cooperative game among the malicious nodes and derive the optimal decision strategy for the them. In the multi-stage case, we propose a discrete-time Markov chain model for the dynamic behavior of both malicious nodes and the 802.22 secondary networks. Simulation and numerical results demonstrate that in the one-stage case, the coordinated attack achieves 10-15% improvement compared to the non-cooperative attack from the perspective of malicious nodes, and, in the multi-stage case, there exists an optimal number of malicious nodes that maximize the net payoff under the steady state.