CRII: CNS: Security Assessment of Spectrum Coexistence in Co-located Heterogeneous Wireless IoT Networks

Today’s advancement in wireless access to telecommunication networks (e.g., Internet) is attributed to Marconi’s century-old radio design, where the radio spectrum is divided into pieces and given to different wireless technologies/entities. Though it worked for the most part of the last decade, this strategy has become a bottleneck and unable to accommodate future growth in wireless communications, especially with the introduction of Internet-of-Things (IoT).

The exponentially increasing radio spectrum demand has forced us to forge new paths to improve spectrum utilization, such as network densification and coexistence among heterogeneous IoT networks on the same channel. Nonetheless, the synergy of network densification and spectrum sharing will increase the co-channel interference and lead to more complex inter-technology interactions, which require well-designed spectrum sharing mechanisms.

However, designing such mechanisms is not trivial - not only due to technical aspects but also due to added security vulnerabilities. The introduction of shared spectrum access in a dense scenario drastically changes the balance among lower layers (i.e., PHY and MAC) and compels a radical change in the security protocol design. This project introduces a novel security vulnerability in coexistence among co-located heterogeneous IoT devices (e.g., LTE, Wi-Fi) and aims to develop security mechanisms to counteract the proposed attack.

The project aims to ensure a fair and secure coexistence on the spectrum, contributing to the growth of future wireless technologies in many more centuries to come. In addition, this project will provide the students at Towson University with resources to pursue network security research at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

This project concentrates on the unique security weaknesses created from the dense use of a shared spectrum between co-located heterogeneous IoT networks. The proposed research will take a multi-pronged approach by: (1) developing formal models based on PHY and MAC layer attributes to understand how attackers may exploit the shared spectrum access among heterogeneous networks, (2) designing a Markov decision process-based novel safeguard strategy to circumvent such attacks, and (3) developing a software-defined testbed to materialize the proposed approaches. This research will lay the groundwork for upcoming system research on spectrum coexistence.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.