A novel Intrusion Detection System for MANETs

This paper proposes a novel Intrusion Detection System (IDS) for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) that aims at overcoming the limitations and weaknesses of the existing IDSs. The proposed IDS incorporates a novel random walk-based IDS architecture as well as a multi-layer, specification-based detection engine. The proposed solution does not belong to any of the existing intrusion detection approaches, since it relies on a set of robust, self-contained Random Walk Detectors (RWDs), which may freely move from node to node and randomly traverse a network, while monitoring each visiting node for malicious behaviour. RWDs exhibit a number of benefits including locality, simplicity, low overhead, and robustness to changes in topology. Moreover, the multi-layer, specification-based engine monitors the transport, network and data link layers of the protocol stack, providing an integrated solution capable of detecting the majority of security attacks occurring in MANETs.