Privacy-Preserving and Secure Spectrum Sharing for Database-Driven Cognitive Radio Networks

2026-02-17

AI Summary

Database-driven cognitive radio networks face significant security challenges, including location privacy leakage, location spoofing, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, while lacking a unified solution that simultaneously ensures regulatory compliance and privacy protection. This work proposes SLAPX, an end-to-end security framework that, for the first time, achieves user anonymity, location privacy, verifiable location claims, and DoS resilience under regulatory constraints. SLAPX integrates delegatable anonymous credentials, verifiable delay functions (VDFs), RLRS-based rate limiting, and an adaptive location verification mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that SLAPX substantially reduces communication overhead and latency while effectively mitigating location spoofing and DoS attacks, confirming its practical deployability in real-world scenarios.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Application Domains: Security
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Scheduling under Uncertainty

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Location- and context-aware Web and WoT applications and services
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

Database-driven cognitive radio networks (DB-CRNs) enable dynamic spectrum sharing through geolocation databases but introduce critical security and privacy challenges, including mandatory location disclosure, susceptibility to location spoofing, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on centralized services. Existing approaches address these issues in isolation and lack a unified, regulation-compliant solution under realistic adversarial conditions. In this work, we present a unified security framework for DB-CRNs that simultaneously provides location privacy, user anonymity, verifiable location, and DoS resilience. Our framework, denoted as SLAPX, enables privacy-preserving spectrum queries using delegatable anonymous credentials, supports adaptive location verification without revealing precise user location, and mitigates DoS attacks through verifiable delay functions (VDFs) combined with RLRS-based rate limiting. Extensive cryptographic benchmarking and network simulations demonstrate that SLAPX achieves significantly lower latency and communication overhead than existing solutions while effectively resisting location spoofing and DoS attacks. These results show that SLAPX is practical and well-suited for secure next-generation DB-CRN deployments.

Problem

• privacy-preserving
• secure spectrum sharing
• location spoofing
• denial-of-service attacks
• database-driven cognitive radio networks

Innovation

• privacy-preserving spectrum sharing
• delegatable anonymous credentials
• verifiable delay functions
• location spoofing resistance
• DoS resilience