Defending Against SSDF Attacks From Randomly Appearing Intelligent Malicious Vehicle Users in the CIoV Network by Bayesian Stackelberg Game

This article proposes an incomplete information Bayesian Stackelberg game, which is adapted to the Cognitive Internet of Vehicles (CIoVs) network to defend against spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attacks from malicious vehicle users (MVUs). Specifically, this article considers the random appearance of MVUs caused by mobility, intelligent SSDF attacks of MVUs, and the different spectrum sensing performances among vehicle users (VUs). In the game, the fusion center (FC) as the leader aims to improve the global detection performance while effectively identifying the identities of different VUs by optimizing the global decision threshold and the reputation threshold. On the other hand, this article models the random appearance of MVUs as a Poisson random process, and the MVUs are the intelligent followers; they optimize the attack probabilities according to the FC’s strategies to evade detection and increase the chance of selfish transmission and the damage to the CIoV network. To solve the MVUs’ nonconvex optimization problem, this article uses the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique to obtain MVUs’ optimal attack probabilities. For the FC, this article proposes the method combining alternating optimization and SCA to solve the nonconvex optimization problem of the FC and obtain its optimal defense strategies. This article also proves the convergence of the proposed method and the existence of the Stackelberg equilibrium (SE). The simulation results demonstrate the validity and superiority of the proposed method compared with traditional methods.