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Security Enhanced Communications in Cognitive Networks Qiben Yan Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science and Applications Wenjing Lou (Chair) Y. Thomas Hou Ing-Ray Chen Danfeng Yao Sushil Jajodia June 23, 2014 Falls Church, Virginia Keywords: cognitive network security, cognitive radio network, reactive jamming attack, network monitoring, botnet detection. c Copyright 2014, Qiben Yan Security Enhanced Communications in Cognitive Networks Qiben Yan ABSTRACT With the advent of ubiquitous computing and Internet of Things (IoT), potentially billions of devices will create a broad range of data services and applications, which will require the communication networks to efficiently manage the increasing complexity. Cognitive network has been envisioned as a new paradigm to address this challenge, which has the capability of reasoning, planning and learning by incorporating cutting edge technologies including knowledge representation, context awareness, network optimization and machine learning. Cognitive network spans over the entire communication system including the core network and wireless links across the entire protocol stack. Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) is a part of cognitive network over wireless links, which endeavors to better utilize the spectrum resources. Core network provides a reliable backend infrastructure to the entire communication system. However, the CR communication and core network infrastructure have attracted various security threats, which become increasingly severe in pace with the growing complexity and adversity of the modern Internet. The focus of this dissertation is to exploit the security vulnerabilities of the state-of-the-art cognitive communication systems, and to provide detection, mitigation and protection mech- anisms to allow security enhanced cognitive communications including wireless communica- tions in CRNs and wired communications in core networks. In order to provide secure and reliable communications in CRNs: first, we incorporate security mechanisms into fundamen- tal CRN functions, such as secure spectrum sensing techniques that will ensure trustworthy reporting of spectrum reading. Second, as no security mechanism can completely prevent all potential threats from entering CRNs, we design a systematic passive monitoring framework, SpecMonitor, based on unsupervised machine learning methods to strategically monitor the network traffic and operations in order to detect abnormal and malicious behaviors. Third, highly capable cognitive radios allow more sophisticated reactive jamming attack, which im- poses a serious threat to CR communications. By exploiting MIMO interference cancellation techniques, we propose jamming resilient CR communication mechanisms to survive in the presence of reactive jammers. Finally, we focus on protecting the core network from botnet threats by applying cognitive technologies to detect network-wide Peer-to-Peer (P2P) bot- nets, which leads to the design of a data-driven botnet detection system, called PeerClean. In all the four research thrusts, we present thorough security analysis, extensive simulations and testbed evaluations based on real-world implementations. Our results demonstrate that the proposed defense mechanisms can effectively and efficiently counteract sophisticated yet powerful attacks. To my beloved wife, Luna Le Lu, and my parents Yaqin Chen and Shifu Yan iii Acknowledgments To have reached this point in my life, I have been offered so many guidance and support from people who have changed my life. I owe a debt of gratitude to them all, and I would really like to express my deepest appreciations here. First and formost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor Dr. Wenjing Lou. Her research attitude, sense of responsibility and pursuit of excellent really inspire me along the past years. Dr. Lou was instrumental in helping me develop my research skills and presentation skills, providing me with invaluable perspective and encouragement along the way. I can't thank her enough for giving me the opportunity to learn from and work with her, for patiently meeting with me, talking about my ideas, answering my questions and proofreading my papers. Her logical way of thinking and her keen sense of future technology have been of great value to me. Dr. Lou not only guided my research in the past few years, but she also cares for my life and personal growth with great thoughtfulness. I feel fortunate to find an advisor who has always shown respects for my own interests, and done everything she could to help make me successful. I am grateful for what she has done for me. I am also extremely grateful to Dr. Thomas Hou, who gave me invaluable guidance and advice on my life, research and career. Dr. Hou was working closely with me throughout my Ph.D. studies. He has been an inspiration to me with his great interest and passion on research. His detailed-oriented, determination and hardworking style encourage me to follow iv my heart, never lose hope and keep pursuing my dream. I am also thankful to Dr. Ing-Ray Chen, Dr. Danfeng Yao and Dr. Sushil Jajodia for serving on my dissertation committee. Their insightful questions and comments about my research greatly contributed to improving this dissertation. I would like to thank Dr. Ming Li. As a collaborator, he always provided helpful comments and advices on my research. Dr. Li worked closely with me in the past few years, who discussed with me about the research ideas and inspired me with his broad knowledge and keen insights. I am grateful to Dr. Zhenyu Yang and Dr. Ning Cao, two previous colleagues, who discussed ideas with me in various stages of my research and offered generous help into my research and life. I also want to thank Dr. Liang Xiao for her helpful discussions on wireless security and privacy. I am thankful to Dr. Feng Chen for helping me embrace the machine learning and artificial intelligence world. Feng gave me inspirations on applying and developing machine learning mechanisms for security purposes. I wish to thank my former colleague, Hanfei Zhao, and my labmates in the Complex Networks and Security Research (CNSR) lab at Northern Virginia Center: Yao Zheng, Ning Zhang, Bing Wang, Changlai Du, Wenhai Sun for creating an intellectual and enjoyable atmosphere, and making my Ph.D. a memorable journey. I benefited tremendously from the discussions and interactions with my labmates. I also want to thank my former and current labmates in CNSR lab at Blacksburg: Dr. Canming Jiang, Dr. Liguang Xie, Huacheng Zeng, Xu Yuan, who shared their knowledge on wireless networking and operations research with me. I am especially indebted to Yao Zheng and Huacheng Zeng, who put great efforts in improving and implementing our research ideas. I am greatly indebted to my father Shifu Yan, and my mother Yaqin Chen. They always v understand me and support my choices with endless love. They have done so much for me professionally and personally. They have sacrificed so much to support me along this wonderful journey. I truly will never be able to repay them with what they have done for me. More importantly, I am specially indebted to my wife Luna Lu. In my mind, her life and her dream are what I am living for. I truly would not be pursuing Ph.D. degree without her support and understanding. My wife has been, and always will be my best friend. At my best time, and more importantly, at my worst time, I know that she will always stand by my side, celebrating my achievements, and giving me love and hope during the frustrating time. I am fortunate to have a wife who cares for me more than herself. Her inspiring words can always cheer me up, and her beautiful smile can always calm me down. Although we were separated during these years by the whole North American continent, she always believed in me, and encouraged me to work hard and play harder. I would surely not be able to reach this far without her support and encouragement. I cannot even imagine where I would be today were it not for the people I love, thank you so much for always believing in me. vi Contents Abstract ii Dedication iii Acknowledgments iv List of Figures xi List of Tables xiv 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Cognitive Networks . .2 1.2 Security Challenges in Cognitive Networks . .3 1.2.1 Spectrum Sensing Security in CRNs . .4 1.2.2 Network Security in CRNs . .6 1.2.3 Reliable CR Communications with Adversarial Software Radios . .7 1.2.4 Botnet Threats to Cognitive Communications in Core Networks . .8 1.3 Research Contributions . 10 1.4 Organization . 13 2 Secure Distributed Consensus-based Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks 14 2.1 Related Work . 15 2.2 System Model . 16 vii 2.2.1 Network Model . 16 2.2.2 Distributed Consensus-based Spectrum Sensing . 17 2.3 Vulnerability Analysis of Distributed Consensus-based Spectrum Sensing . 19 2.3.1 Disruption of Sensing Operation . 20 2.3.2 Stealthy Manipulation of Sensing Results . 23 2.4 Protection of Distributed Consensus-based Spectrum Sensing . 26 2.4.1 Robust Distributed Outlier Detection with Adaptive Local Threshold 27 2.4.2 Hash-based Computation Verification of Neighbor State Update . 30 2.5 Evaluation . 33 2.5.1 Impact of Covert Adaptive Data Injection Attacker . 34 2.5.2 Effectiveness of Robust Distributed Outlier Detection with Adaptive Local Threshold . 35 2.5.3 Security Analysis of Hash-based Computation Verification Approach . 36 2.5.4 Cost Evaluation of Hash-based Computation Verification Approach . 39 2.6 Summary . 40 3 Non-Parametric Passive Traffic Monitoring in Cognitive Radio Networks 41 3.1 Related Work . 42 3.2 System Model . 44 3.2.1 Monitoring System Model . 44 3.2.2 Channel Access Model . 46 3.3 User Channel Access Prediction .