Securing cognitive radio enabled smart grid systems against cyber attacks

Abstract

Recently cognitive radio technology gets attention to enhance the performance of smart grid communication networks. In this paper, we present a cognitive radio enabled smart grid architecture. We then discuss major cyber security challenges in smart grid deployment and additional challenges introduced by cognitive radio technology. Spectrum sensing is one of the important aspect for opportunistic spectrum access in cognitive radio enabled smart grid networks. Cooperative spectrum sensing can improve the sensing performance in which multiple cognitive radio users cooperate to sense primary user bands. However, cooperative spectrum sensing is vulnerable to incumbent emulation and spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attacks. Thus, we propose a two-stage scheme for defense against SSDF attacks. Simulation results show that the proposed two-stage scheme can identify and exclude the attackers accurately.