Certificateless linkable ring signature‐based blockchains for securing cognitive radio networks

Summary Rapid advancement in industrial applications of Internet of Things (IoT) has dramatically increased the number of Internet connected devices resulting in big challenges of scalability, adaptability, connectivity, and accessibility. Cognitive radio is efficient in handling spectrum allocation problem by facilitating the allocation of unlicensed spectrum dynamically to the IoT applications. However, cognitive radio network (CRN) capability of spectrum sensing is highly vulnerable to diversified number of security attacks. Malicious user disturbs the spectrum sensing potential and minimizes its accuracy by launching attacks during the detection of primary signal. In this article, certificateless linkable ring signature‐based blockchains (CLRSB) is proposed for securing CRNs by achieving reliable discrimination between trustworthy users through cryptographic keys. It initially transformed the complete set of users such as PUs and SUs into the structure of blocks representing the smart contracts‐based traditional public ledger blockchain that gets integrated to form a decentralized network for attaining improvement in efficient spectrum sensing. It adopted a mayfly optimization algorithm (MFOA)‐improved CNN (MFOA‐ICNN)‐based spectrum sensing method for preventing the interference between PUs and SUs during spectrum access. It also used MFOA for optimizing the features with balanced trade‐off between exploration and exploitation to identify the remarkable features that attributes toward efficient spectrum sensing. It specifically used CLRS for protecting information about the transaction initiator for the objective of protecting blockchain privacy. Simulation experiments of this CLRSB confirmed better response time and minimized frame loss on an average by 18.13% and 17.81%, better than the baseline schemes used for investigation.