Most commercial wireless devices do not make lower-layer properties (e.g., raw waveform-level samples from an analog-to-digital converter) accessible to users. Recently, however, the research community has directed its attention towards the development of cognitive radios that will expose the lower-layers of the protocol stack to researchers and developers. Although the promise of such a flexible platform is great, there are also some serious potential security drawbacks. It is easily conceivable that cognitive radios could become an ideal platform for abuse since the lowest layers of the protocol stack will be accessible to programmers in an open-source manner. The proposed project addresses these concerns by focusing on two important building blocks needed in constructing a holistic solution to ensuring the trustworthy operation of software radios: first, the investigating team plans to develop tools to quantify the degree to which spectrum etiquette policies are abused in a network of cognitive radios and, second, the team plans to investigate methods for identifying such spectrum abuse, which is necessary in order to drive anomaly detection and response mechanisms. Overall, the broader impact of the effort is centered around the fact that cognitive radios represent an emerging technology that requires security mechanisms to be developed before these highly-programmable radios reach the public market.
