Abstract
The vast revolution in networking is increasing rapidly along with technology advancements, which requires more effort from all cyberspace professionals to cope with the challenges that come with advanced technology privileges and services. Hence, Cognitive Radio Network is one of the promising approaches that permit a dynamic type of smart network for improving the utilization of idle spectrum portions of wireless communications. However, it is vulnerable to security threats and attacks and demands security mechanisms to preserve and protect the cognitive radio networks for ensuring a secure communication environment. This paper presents an effective secure MAC protocol for cognitive radio networks, significantly enhancing the security level of the existing DSMCRN and SSMCRN protocols by eliminating the authentication server's necessity, which can be a single point of failure to compromise the entire network communication. The proposed protocol has proven to be effective and reliable since it does not rely on a centralized entity for providing the required security for a single pair of cognitive users. The protocol also improves the performance in the context of fast switching to data channels leading to higher throughput is achieved compared to the benchmark protocols.