A novel symmetric key cryptographic authentication for cooperative communication in cognitive radio networks

Due to striving and opportunistic nature of cognitive radio (CR) technology, nodes are always haunting to seize the opportunity to transmit. Finding a wireless channel for secure communication, in CR mobile ad-hoc networks, is one of the challenging tasks. In this paper, a novel secure authentication mechanism for communication in CR mobile ad-hoc networks is proposed. The mechanism consists of two phases: authentication and confidential communication. In authentication, before joining the ad-hoc network, CR nodes are validated by obtaining security credentials from a server. In confidential communication, CR nodes make use of symmetric key cryptography to encrypt data for secure communication between two CR nodes. Furthermore, the provision of two-fold security in our scheme makes the communication in CR networks more secure against traditional security threats and vulnerabilities.