A Game Approach for an Efficient Intrusion Detection System in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have become a necessary complement to any security infrastructure and are widely deployed as an additional line of defense to conventional security techniques. Intrusion detection techniques have been widely studied in the literature for the conventional networks. However, due to the specific characteristics of the mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), such as the lack of a fixed infrastructure and a centralized management, the implementation of an IDS presents several new challenges that must be addressed. In this paper, we present a game-based approach to implement an intrusion detection system in MANETs. We consider the selfish node behavior and discuss mechanisms that stimulate cooperation between nodes while reducing the consumption of energy due to deployment of the IDS. We also address the problem of increasing the effectiveness of security mechanism by developing a network packet sampling strategy, to effectively detect network intrusions with respect to a given total sampling budget, and find the right moment for notifying specific nodes to launch countermeasures. Finally, we evaluate the proposed approach via simulations where the results show the effectiveness of the proposed intrusion detection model.