Security Mechanisms to Defend against New Attacks on Software-Defined Radio

Software-defined radio (SDR) enables the flexible and efficient use of spectrum, which is a key technology to maintain high quality wireless services in the future. However, the flexibility of SDR brings serious security concerns of malicious attacks to the radio equipment. In this paper, we present a novel defense scheme for SDR to avoid the configuration parameters being tampered by malicious software, even if the operating system is comprised. Three manipulation attacks of radio parameters are considered. We developed a module called Security Monitor which is deployed below the operating system (OS) level and above the hardware level, to monitor and verify the configuration parameters in a timely manner. To demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed security mechanism, we implemented the Security Monitor on Ettus Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) software-defined radio nodes, and evaluated its overhead. The experimental results show that the time overheads to detect the three types of manipulation attacks are 2.9 microsecond, 2.86 microsecond, and 3.4 microsecond, respectively.