Location Privacy Preservation for Secondary Users in a Database-Driven Cognitive Radio Network

Since their introduction, Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN), as a new solution to the problem of spectrum scarcity, have received great attention from the research society. An important field in database-driven CRN studies is pivoted on their security issues. A critical issue in this context is user's location privacy, which is potentially under serious threat. The query process by secondary users (SU) from the database is one of the points where the problem rises. In this paper, we propose a Privacy-Preserving Query Process (PPQP), accordingly. This method lets SUs deal in the process of spectrum query without sacrificing their location information. Analytical assessment of PPQP's privacy preservation capability shows that it preserves location privacy for SUs against different adversaries, with very high probability. Relatively low communicational cost is a significant property of our protocol. (C) 2020 ISC. All rights reserved.