Agents for Intrusion Detection in MANET: A Survey and Analysis

Abstract

Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs) are believed to be highly vulnerable to security threats due to the numerous constraints they present such as: the absence of a fixed infrastructure, the dynamic topology change, their dependence on cooperative communication, the unreliability of wireless links and most importantly the absence of a clear line of defense. Since intrusion detection and agent technology proved to offer several potential advantages, there has been a great tendency for using agents to build optimal, adaptive and comprehensive intrusion detection systems to fit MANET security requirements. This chapter presents a survey and analysis of the work that has been recently done for the deployment of agent technology in the area of MANET intrusion detection. In particular, recent advances in that field in terms of existing frameworks, architectures and implementations as well as a discussion of the obtained advantages in addition to the potentially introduced vulnerabilities are presented.