QPADL: Post-Quantum Private Spectrum Access with Verified Location and DoS Resilience
This work addresses critical security and privacy challenges in spectrum access systems, which are essential for future wireless communication, by providing a comprehensive post-quantum secure solution.
QPADL is the first post-quantum secure framework for Spectrum Access Systems that simultaneously ensures privacy, anonymity, location verification, and DoS resilience, with performance evaluations demonstrating practicality and scalability.
With advances in wireless communication and growing spectrum scarcity, Spectrum Access Systems (SASs) offer an opportunistic solution but face significant security challenges. Regulations require disclosure of location coordinates and transmission details, exposing user privacy and anonymity during spectrum queries, while the database operations themselves permit Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. As location-based services, SAS is also vulnerable to compromised or malicious users conducting spoofing attacks. These threats are further amplified given the advances in quantum computing. Thus, we propose QPADL, the first post-quantum (PQ) secure framework that simultaneously ensures privacy, anonymity, location verification, and DoS resilience while maintaining efficiency for large-scale spectrum access systems. QPADL introduces SAS-tailored private information retrieval for location privacy, a PQ-variant of Tor for anonymity, and employs advanced signature constructions for location verification alongside client puzzle protocols and rate-limiting technique for DoS defense. We formally assess its security and conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation, incorporating GPU parallelization and optimization strategies to demonstrate practicality and scalability.