Intrusion Detection In Wireless Ad Hoc Networks PDF Download

While wireless ad-hoc networks continue to become more popular, the number of attacks on computer systems increases each year. These attacks are common occurrences in both the wired and wireless network environments. The wireless ad-hoc environment is susceptible to many attacks. Wireless ad-hoc networks are vulnerable to common wireless attacks (e.g. jamming) and attacks more specific to the ad-hoc environment (e.g. sleep deprivation attacks). Encryption and authentication mechanisms alone have never been enough to prevent intrusions. Encryption can usually be broken, even if a brute-force attack is required, and authentication can easily be defeated (e.g. stealing a password or gaining access to a host which is already authenticated). Because of this, a second line of defense is needed. Intrusion detection systems have proven to be effective at providing this second line of defense. Establishing this second line of defense in a wireless ad-hoc network though brings with it many challenges. Such challenges consist of dealing with the ease that hosts enter and leave the network at random, of hosts being physically attacked or stolen and the possibility of an attacker disrupting the network through data route changes. This thesis aims to research agent-based intrusion detection systems and provide the design and implementation of an intrusion detection system based on mobile agents in a wireless ad-hoc network. Utilizing research from intrusion detection systems, mobile agents and event correlation, we design a system for detecting intrusions in wireless ad-hoc networks by means of mobile agents. With the design created, we implement our mobile agent intrusion detection system using mobile devices set up in a wireless ad-hoc network. The system is then tested against three attack scenarios - two real-time, online attacks and one off-line attack.