A cross-layer based intrusion detection approach for wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

Wireless ad-hoc networks are vulnerable to various kinds of security threats and attacks due to relative ease of access to wireless medium and lack of a centralized infrastructure. In this paper, we seek to detect and mitigate the denial of service (DoS) attacks that prevent authorized users from gaining access to the networks. These attacks affect the service availability and connectivity of the wireless networks and hence reduce the network performance. To this end, we propose a novel cross-layer based intrusion detection system (CIDS) to identify the malicious node(s). Exploiting the information available across different layers of the protocol stack by triggering multiple levels of detection, enhances the accuracy of detection. We validate our design through simulations and also demonstrate lower occurrence of false positives