A Dynamic Covert Passive Actors Detection Scheme for a Healthy Networked Community

Abstract

For a network community, passive attacks are of the nature of eavesdropping on, monitoring of, transmissions where the goal of the attacker is to obtain information that is being transmitted. Unlike active attacks that are easy to detect and prevent, passive attacks are difficult to detect and therefore hard to prevent. Research in this area has mainly focused on preventing the attacks rather than detecting the covert attacker. For example existing eavesdropping schemes address the problem mainly by employing encryption. But encryption by itself is not enough because passive attacks can occur in more ways than just observing exposed data. It is also known that encryption is not always applicable for example in open wireless communication protocols. This observation has motivated us to design a scheme that aims to reduce such attackers' capability extent by intercepting and eradicating them as soon as possible. Our scheme detects, sequesters, investigates, and expels such malicious passive actors from the networked community.