EARS: Intelligent and Cross-Layer Attack and Defense in Spectrum Sharing

EARS：频谱共享中的智能跨层攻防

• 批准号: 1444009
• 负责人: Huaiyu Dai
• 金额: $ 48万
• 依托单位: North Carolina State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-01-01 至 2020-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1444009&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EARS; Intelligent; Cross; Layer; Attack

With the proliferation of wireless applications and devices, most recently the smart phones, the demand for wireless data, equivalently for wireless bandwidth, keeps an exponential growth. Unfortunately, all our wireless vision needs to be realized through the public radio spectrum, which cannot be further created but has to be efficiently shared among various wireless systems and devices. While significant progress has been made in efficient spectrum access and sharing technologies, their successful deployment towards fulfilling the national broadband plan relies crucially on the development of adequate security mechanisms. Such security mechanisms should be able to protect the welfare of all stakeholders in the spectrum sharing systems, in particular the federal government and military users; meanwhile, they should also be able to address the new challenges brought about by the advanced technologies and new access paradigms that have enabled innovative spectrum sharing. At the current stage, an effective security mechanism for spectrum sharing systems is lacking, which significantly impedes their practical deployment and consequently the realization of the anticipated wireless broadband revolution. This proposal constitutes a solid step towards filling this gap, seeking to obtain a deeper understanding of the emerging attacking strategy and behavior in this new arena, and develop a holistic view and solution to the security of spectrum access and sharing. The expected outcome will be valuable to all players in wireless industry, as well as to all sectors of the national economy that benefit from wireless innovation. The inter-disciplinary nature of the proposed research will naturally help promote cross-disciplinary education and well-rounded training of future IT workforce.The proposed research will be focused on the security aspects of the dynamic spectrum access (DSA) paradigm and cognitive radio (CR) technology, which receive major research interest and also impose foremost research challenges. It is comprised of two thrusts. First, cross-layer attack and defense in CR networks will be addressed. Current research on CR security mainly focuses on attacks and defenses at individual protocol layers, but cross-layer attack naturally fits the CR setting and can lead to unprecedented detrimental effect. In this project, a general class of cross-layer attacks will be investigated. In response to cross-layer attacks, a cross-layer defense framework is subsequently proposed, for which two research tasks will be focused on: advance in individual detection modules for attacks unique to CR functionalities, and metrics-driven cross-layer fusion. In existing studies, the assumed capabilities at CR are rather modest. With the further development of CR technology, wireless devices will grow in reasoning and learning capabilities. Meanwhile, such technology progress can also be exploited by the adversaries to launch more sophisticated malicious attacks. In the second thrust, assuming more intelligence and growing reasoning and learning capabilities for both the CR user and the adversary, the arms race between them will be explored through the stochastic game modeling and multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methodologies. The proposed research will be evaluated through theoretical analysis, numerical and network simulation, prototype implementation, and experimentation on real testbeds.

随着无线应用和设备的激增，最近的智能手机，对无线数据的需求，相当于对无线带宽的需求，保持指数增长。不幸的是，我们所有的无线愿景都需要通过公共无线电频谱来实现，这些频谱无法进一步创建，但必须在各种无线系统和设备之间有效共享。虽然在有效的频谱接入和共享技术方面取得了重大进展，但为实现国家宽带计划而成功部署这些技术，关键取决于建立适当的安全机制。这种安全机制应该能够保护频谱共享系统中所有利益相关者的福利，特别是联邦政府和军方用户;同时，它们还应该能够应对先进技术和新的接入模式带来的新挑战，这些技术和新的接入模式使创新的频谱共享成为可能。在现阶段，频谱共享系统缺乏有效的安全机制，这严重阻碍了它们的实际部署，从而阻碍了预期的无线宽带革命的实现。该提案构成了填补这一空白的坚实一步，旨在更深入地了解这一新竞技场中新兴的攻击策略和行为，并为频谱访问和共享的安全性制定整体观点和解决方案。预期的结果将对无线产业的所有参与者以及受益于无线创新的国民经济的所有部门都有价值。建议研究的跨学科性质，自然有助推动跨学科教育及培训未来的资讯科技人才。建议研究将集中于动态频谱接入（DSA）模式及认知无线电（CR）技术的安全方面，这两项技术备受关注，亦是最重要的研究挑战。它由两个推力组成。首先，将解决CR网络中的跨层攻击和防御。目前对CR安全性的研究主要集中在单个协议层的攻击和防御上，而跨层攻击则与CR环境有着天然的契合性，并可能导致前所未有的危害。在这个项目中，将研究一般的跨层攻击。针对跨层攻击，本文提出了一个跨层防御框架，重点研究了两个方面的问题：一是针对CR功能特有的攻击的独立检测模块的改进，二是度量驱动的跨层融合。在现有的研究中，假定的能力在CR是相当温和的。随着CR技术的进一步发展，无线设备将在推理和学习能力方面不断增长。同时，这种技术进步也可以被对手利用来发动更复杂的恶意攻击。在第二个推力中，假设CR用户和对手都有更多的智能和不断增长的推理和学习能力，他们之间的军备竞赛将通过随机博弈建模和多智能体强化学习（MARL）方法来探索。所提出的研究将通过理论分析，数值和网络仿真，原型实现，并在真实的试验台上的实验进行评估。