Location privacy preservation in collaborative spectrum sensing

—Collaborative spectrum sensing has been regarded as a promising approach to enable secondary users to detect primary users by exploiting spatial diversity. In this paper, we consider a converse question: could space diversity be exploited by a malicious entity, e.g., an external attacker or an untrusted Fusion Center (FC), to achieve involuntary geolocation of a secondary user by linking his location-dependent sensing report to his physical position. We answer this question by identifying a new security threat in collaborative sensing from testbed implementation, and it is shown that the attackers could geo-locate a secondary user from its sensing report with a successful rate of above 90% even in the presence of data aggregation. We then introduce a novel location privacy definition to quantify the location privacy leaking in collaborative sensing. We propose a Privacy Preserving collaborative Spectrum Sensing (PPSS) scheme, which includes two primitive protocols: Privacy Preservi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Shuai Li, Haojin Zhu, Zhaoyu Gao, Xinping Guan, Kai Xing, Xuemin Shen
• Keywords: Communications, Fusion Center, INFOCOM 2012, Malicious Entity, Spatial Diversity