Case Study: Security Analysis of a Dynamic Spectrum Access Radio System

Dynamic Spectrum Access technology is now well beyond the developmental stages that it was several years ago. Several prototype devices have been created and have been successfully demonstrated at various venues. Recently the FCC has approved the decision for moving ahead with allowing white space devices to operate in the same frequency bands as TV transmitters. Through rigourous testing the FCC has validated the fundamental concept of these DSA radios showing that they can avoid primary users and cause a minimal amount of interference in trusted wireless environments. However, wireless environments can not always be trusted to contain naturally occuring features. Malicious users may introduce false environments such as increased noise levels or emulated primary user signals, in order to fool the DSA device. These uncontrolled environments must be explored in order to develop and embed proper security protocols within these next-generation devices to prevent future security issues. Even in the case of IEEE 802.11, the commercial world found that the security threats were severely overlooked, causing developers to play catch up while many systems were, and still are, left vulnerable. In this paper, we provide a security analysis on a well established DSA radio developed by Shared Spectrum Company under the DARPA xG program. Our analysis demonstrates the unique security vulnerabilities associated with DSA protocols and expose the extremely low barrier required for a malicious user to exploit them if not security measures are in place. We identify several of these unique vulnerabilities and suggest methods for mitigating them.