MadeCR: Correlation-based malware detection for cognitive radio

Abstract

Cognitive Radio (CR) is an intelligent radio technology to boost spectrum utilization and is likely to be widely spread in the near future. However, its flexible software-oriented design may be exploited by an adversary to control CR devices to launch large scale attacks on a wide range of critical wireless infrastructures. To proactively mitigate the potentially serious threat, this paper presents MadeCR, a Correlation-based Malware detection system for CR. MadeCR exploits correlations among CR applications' component actions to detect malicious behaviors. In addition, a significant contribution of the paper is a general experimentation method referred to as mutation testing to comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of the anomaly detection method against a large number of artificial malware cases. Evaluation shows that MadeCR detects malicious behaviors within 1.10s at an accuracy of 94.9%.