Hardware-Aided Secure Architecture for Software Defined Radio

Abstract

Maintaining the information supremacy has always been a goal of Department of Defense and the US Army. Secure and efficient wireless communications are essential in achieving shared situational awareness among all front-line forces, sensors, weapons and decision makers. As the limited physical resource of the wireless spectrum becomes increasingly congested, dynamic spectrum access is poised to become the next generation wireless communications paradigm. Software defined radio nodes in cognitive radio networks face unique security challenges such as trusted sensing, tamper resistance, and radio access policy enforcement. Observing that trusted radio lies in the foundation of many desirable properties in cognitive radio network, we propose to study the future system architecture of trusted radio systems. Our proposed study will adopt hardware-aided secure execution environment, such as ARM TrustZone, in the design of cognitive radio systems. Using the hardware protection, it will be possible to defend against cyberattacks that can compromise the operating system of the radio node. This new architecture for trusted radio will serve as one of the foundations for the construction of secure cognitive radio networks for the US Army.

Document Details

Document Type
DoD Grant Award
Publication Date
Feb 14, 2019
Source ID
W911NF1810305

Entities

People

  • Wenjing Lou

Organizations

  • Army Contracting Command
  • United States Army
  • Virginia Tech

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking
  • Cybersecurity.
  • Radio communications and signal processing.