A cooperative intrusion detection system for ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networking (MANET) has become an exciting and important technology in recent years because of the rapid proliferation of wireless devices. MANETs are highly vulnerable to attacks due to the open medium, dynamically changing network topology, cooperative algorithms, lack of centralized monitoring and management point, and lack of a clear line of defense. In this paper, we report our progress in developing intrusion detection (ID) capabilities for MANET. Building on our prior work on anomaly detection, we investigate how to improve the anomaly detection approach to provide more details on attack types and sources. For several well-known attacks, we can apply a simple rule to identify the attack type when an anomaly is reported. In some cases, these rules can also help identify the attackers. We address the run-time resource constraint problem using a cluster-based detection scheme where periodically a node is elected as the ID agent for a cluster. Compared with the scheme where each node is its own ID agent, this scheme is much more efficient while maintaining the same level of effectiveness. We have conducted extensive experiments using the ns-2 and MobiEmu environments to validate our research.