IU-GUARD: Privacy-Preserving Spectrum Coordination for Incumbent Users under Dynamic Spectrum Sharing

2026-02-11

AI Summary

This work proposes a novel privacy-preserving framework for dynamic spectrum sharing that addresses the limitations of existing mechanisms, which often rely on costly sensing infrastructure or require primary users—such as military radars—to disclose their identities and operational parameters, thereby risking privacy breaches and compromising mission confidentiality. By integrating verifiable credentials (VCs) with zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), the proposed approach enables primary users to prove their authorization to access spectrum resources without revealing their identity. This decouples identity from access rights, ensures unlinkability of spectrum requests, and mitigates the risk of centralized data leakage. Prototype evaluation demonstrates that the scheme achieves strong privacy guarantees while maintaining practical computational and communication overhead, making it suitable for real-time dynamic spectrum sharing scenarios.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Scheduling under Uncertainty
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

With the growing demand for wireless spectrum, dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) frameworks such as the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) have emerged as practical solutions to improve utilization while protecting incumbent users (IUs) such as military radars. However, current incumbent protection mechanisms face critical limitations. The Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) requires costly sensor deployments and remains vulnerable to interference and security risks. Alternatively, the Incumbent Informing Capability (IIC) requires IUs to disclose their identities and operational parameters to the Spectrum Coordination System (SCS), creating linkable records that compromise operational privacy and mission secrecy. We propose IU-GUARD, a privacy-preserving spectrum sharing framework that enables IUs to access spectrum without revealing their identities. Leveraging verifiable credentials (VCs) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), IU-GUARD allows IUs to prove their authorization to the SCS while disclosing only essential operational parameters. This decouples IU identity from spectrum access, prevents cross-request linkage, and mitigates the risk of centralized SCS data leakage. We implement a prototype, and our evaluation shows that IU-GUARD achieves strong privacy guarantees with practical computation and communication overhead, making it suitable for real-time DSS deployment.

Problem

• dynamic spectrum sharing
• incumbent user privacy
• spectrum coordination
• operational secrecy
• identity disclosure

Innovation

• privacy-preserving
• zero-knowledge proofs
• verifiable credentials
• dynamic spectrum sharing
• incumbent user protection