ROUTING MISBEHAVIOUR BASED INTRUSION DETECTION AND RESPONSE SYSTEM FOR WIRELESS AD HOC NETWORKS

Abstract

A wireless ad hoe network is a collection of nodes which form a network in a dynamic manner without the aid of any fixed infrastructure, using wireless links for communication needs. Due to the dynamic formation of network and use of open communication medium, new nodes which could be intruder are able to join the network. Intrusions into the network results in launch of a wide variety of passive and active attacks, which could be in the form of packet dropping, modification, misdirection and generation. In this dissertation, we propose an Intrusion Detection and Response System (IDRS) to deal with intrusions, in case of a proactive routing protocol, by considering packet dropping, modification, misdirection and withholding as the problems of intrusions, by categorizing the nodes as normal or intrusive nodes, based on the routing misbehaviour. We chose the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) routing protocol to model routing misbehaviour of intrusive nodes due to its increased usage, standardization of features and relatively better performance when compared with other existing routing protocols, to complement it with an intrusion detection and response system to serve the formed wireless ad hoc network without compromising to intrusions. The proposed intrusion detection and response system has been simulated using widely known and available Network Simulator 2 on a Linux based platform. Various test cases have been thought of, for which results have been compiled and graphs are drawn depicting the performance improvement yielded by the inclusion of proposed system in OLSR.