Research on Security Protocol for Collaborating Mobile Agents in Network Intrusion Detection Systems

Abstract

Despite the popularity of mobile agents in academic and commercial arena, the security issues associated with them have hindered their adoption on large scale distributed applications. However, researchers are making relentless effort to overcome the security impediments so that the interesting properties inherent in mobile agent application, especially in the field of intrusion detection, can be harnessed. Such properties include: adaptability, autonomous nature, low bandwidth utilization, latency eradication, mobility and intelligence. A number of protocols have been developed by researchers for different key distribution techniques to enhance their performance and to protect communicating entities against malicious attacks that can hinder their activities. However, they do not take into account the availability and fault tolerance of the protocols in case of any possible attack despite the authentication methods offered by encryption. This study therefore, proposes a fault-tolerant key distribution protocol for distributed mobile agents (communicating entities) in network intrusion detection system to facilitate hitch-free collaboration geared towards intrusive packets detection in Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN).