A Novel Intrusion Detection Method for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The mobile ad hoc networks are particularly vulnerable to intrusion, as its features of open medium, dynamic changing topology, cooperative routing algorithms. The traditional way of protecting networks with firewalls and encryption software is no longer sufficient and effective for those features, because no matter how secure the mobile ad hoc networks, its is still possible the nodes are compromised and become malicious. In this paper, we propose a novel intrusion detection approach for mobile ad hoc networks by using finite state machine. We construct the finite state machine (FSM) by the way of manually abstracting the correct behaviours of the node according to the routing protocol of Dynamic Source Routing (DSR). The monitor nodes cooperatively monitor every node's behaviour by the FSM. Our approach can detect real-time attacks without signatures of intrusion or trained data. Finally, we evaluate the intrusion detection method through simulation experiments.