Cost-Benefit Tradeoff of Byzantine Attack in Cooperative Spectrum Sensing

Cooperative spectrum sensing is a promising technology of overcoming the inherent nature of wireless communications to solve the spectrum shortage and underutilization problem. However, the openness of cooperative spectrum sensing makes it susceptible to Byzantine attack, also known as spectrum sensing data falsification. Byzantine attack has been widely studied as a serious threat to cooperative spectrum sensing, which hugely degrades the cooperative sensing performance. Extensive studies have focused on how to mitigate the adverse effect of Byzantine attack on cooperative spectrum sensing. In this article, we first conduct a generic soft Byzantine attack on the basis of the soft combining. By analyzing Byzantine behavior, we provide a comprehensive investigation into attack cost and attack benefit from the malicious perspective, and propose the cost-benefit tradeoff problem under the generalized attack model. Then, we verify the existence of the tradeoff, which is a fundamental issue involved in Byzantine attack, however, ignored by most of the previous studies. Besides, an in-depth analysis on attack risk is done with taking into consideration trust value based cooperative spectrum sensing algorithm, in terms of covertness.