Policy-based privacy-preserving scheme for primary users in database-driven cognitive radio networks

In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), spectrum database has been well recognized as an effective means to dynamically sharing licensed spectrum among primary users (PUs) and secondary users (SUs). In spectrum database, the protected incumbents (a.k.a. PUs) and the CRs (a.k.a. SUs) are required to register in database their operational specifications such as transmitting power, antenna height, time of operation and etc. so as to provide an up-to-date radio map for public queries and avoid possible interference. However, it poses potentially serious privacy problems especially when governmental and military systems participate in spectrum sharing through spectrum database. Most recent research works in database-driven CRNs, however, only focused on protecting user's location privacy but merely studied preserving PUs' operational specifications. In this paper, we propose a secure and privacy-preserving scheme using hidden policy-assisted attribute-based encryption technique to protect sensitive PUs' operational privacy without affecting database's accessibility and spectrum utilization efficiency. The security and performance analysis demonstrates that our scheme is secure and computationally efficient. Additionally, our policy-assisted scheme is practical and promising because of its consistency with FCC/NTIA's rule in spectrum regulation in database-driven CRNs.