Byzantine Attacks in RIS-Enhanced Cooperative Spectrum Sensing: A Decision Fusion Perspective

Abstract: From the perspective of hard decision fusion, we investigate Byzantine attacks in Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS)-enhanced and decode-and-forward relay-assisted Cooperative Spectrum Sensing (CSS) for mobile Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) in this paper. Specially, a RIS-enhanced and decode-and-forward relay-assisted CSS configuration is first constructed under dynamic channel scenarios due to user mobility. Subsequently, the channel- and attack-aware hard decision fusion rules are developed, and the optimal channel-aware Byzantine attack strategies are then developed under both small-scale and large-scale attacking scenarios. The corresponding results depict that the optimal attack strategy does not require any a prior knowledge of the global instantaneous Channel State Information (ICSI) (e.g. false alarm probability and detection probability of all the secondary users), although perfect acquisition of ICSI is clearly always not affordable from the attacker perspective, which is further exacerbated by the RIS and decode-and-forward relays involved in CSS and the potential high mobility of secondary users that leads to fast fading channels. Furthermore, our counterintuitive results also indicate that, regardless of the attacker's awareness of the decision fusion rule, the optimal Byzantine attack can be achieved through a unifying framework, the explicit attack strategy may be not unique, and the attacking effectiveness is primarily determined by the fraction of the Byzantine nodes rather than the channel dynamics. That is, to make the channel-aware approach more practical, the challenge that the heavy reliance on the global ICSI and decision fusion rule in obtaining the Byzantine attacks is successfully relaxed. Finally, we empirically validate our theoretical analysis through extensive simulations across a wide range of attacking scenarios.