Efficient Advanced Encryption Standard for Securing Cognitive Radio Networks

Maria Saher; Asjad Amin; Imran Ali Qureshi; Muhammad Ali Qureshi; Muhammad Moazzam Jawaid

doi:10.22581/muet1982.1804.16

Maria Saher University College of Engineering and Technology, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur
Asjad Amin University College of Engineering and Technology, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur
Imran Ali Qureshi Department of Telecommunication Engineering, Mehran University of Engineering & Technology, Jamshoro
Muhammad Ali Qureshi University College of Engineering and Technology, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur
Muhammad Moazzam Jawaid Department of Computer Systems Engineering, Mehran University of Engineering & Technology, jamshoro

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22581/muet1982.1804.16

Abstract

During the last decade, the CR (Cognitive Radio) came into view as a major wireless technology to resolve the issue of spectrum secrecy and efficient spectrum utilization. However, due to unlicensed (secondary) users, there are various security threats to the CRN (Cognitive Radio Networks). Some malicious users may access the CRN and mislead the secondary users to vacate the occupied channel, which may stop the communication. In this work, we propose a new cryptographic-based algorithm, CRAES (Cognitive Radio-Advanced Encryption Standard), inspired by the traditional AES to secure the CRN. The data of the primary and secondary users is encrypted at the transmitter and decrypted at the receiver. Unlike the conventional AES, we introduce the data-dependent key-generation and shift-rows process. We also reduce the rounds of AES from 10-6 to improve the computational efficiency without compromising the overall security. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CR-AES in terms of better security, reliability, and computational efficiency.