Abstract:
Due to moving from analog TV transmission to digital transmission, there will be free frequencies called TV White Space (TVWS). These frequencies can be reused in broadband communication without the interference with the incumbent and the licenses users. TVWS can be licensed by auction or freely unlicensed, which is preferred by many parties around the world. TVWS unlicensed can use cognitive radio (CR) techniques for sharing the spectrum. Many standards agreed two ways for spectrum sharing, either by spectrum sensing and/or spectrum database. Many researches and standard efforts has been given to TVWS techniques and other related issues like security, frequency allocation, interference, database management, throughput, etc. This thesis concentrated on security issues in spectrum database access specially the authentication.
To avoid the denial of service attack (DOS) and misused of the available channels like the interference, the authentication and key management had become one of the most important security issues to access the TVWS database. So, in this study a new confident and mutual authentication protocol is designed for TVWS database, which introduce new method for key generation and key distribution in a secure manner.
In general, the database security works in the application layer and IEEE802 security works on physical layer, so the user must use two protocol to authenticate themselves with the Database server. The proposed protocol takes the advantages of the available database security and the IEEE.802 security to modify IEEE802.22 Wireless Regional Area Networks (WRAN) standard protocol to generate one protocol which can authenticate the entire link between the user and the database server.
The key management is an integrated process for the authentication protocol and it includes generate and exchange a shared secrete key to encrypt and decrypt the transferring data between the database server and the users. Key management suffers from three problems, first problem is the sender and the receiver send an information (data) which the attacker can use it to get the key, the second problem is the time to generate this key is very long, and the third one when the attackers get the key, they can generate a new key after the available key life time is expired. This protocol designs and implements a new method to generate either on key or a number of keys and exchange them to overcome these problems.
The proposed protocol has been evaluated in terms of security functionality and the performance. The simulation results show that this protocol is more secure and faster than the available protocols.
