Collaborative approach for a MANET Intrusion Detection System using multilateration

The use of Mobile ad hoc networking is a growing trend that encompasses a wide spectrum of application domains, including health care, defense, crisis management and others. In common, they all require quick deployment, dynamic communications, and security assurance. Although substantial effort has been put into the security aspect, the results so far have not been enough to claim high levels of information security. The usual way to conceive a secure network is to adopt perfectly secure encryption algorithms, secure protocols, and intrusion detection methods. Nevertheless, networks are still vulnerable to diverse factors, such as poor software design, information leakage from social engineering, and others. Once a network is compromised, the enemy is able not only to eavesdrop sensitive information but also to mislead valid users and to harm the operations supported by the network. Thus, in addition to the regular security measures, the ability of identifying adversaries before they become active is extremely desirable. This paper proposes to achieve this ability by applying a combination of different techniques to the design of a Collaborative MANET Intrusion Detection System (IDS). The system enhances the mobile network security using a secondary network of sensors, multilateration, predictive location algorithm, and information sharing protocol. To illustrate the concept, we developed a military tactical scenario simulation using three distinct software tools.