Security Enhanced Mobile Agent-based Intrusion Detection and Response System for Coordinated Attacks

With the rapid increase in connectivity and accessibility of networked information systems, attackers become more and more sophisticated and distributed in nature. Existing intrusion detection approaches are not efficient enough to track down and detect the coordinated attacks. In this proposal, we propose a novel Mobile Agent-based Intrusion Detection System by taking advantages of proactive and collaborative features of both stationary and mobile agents. Our objective is to accurately detect coordinated distributed attacks with the consideration of agent communication security and trust. The key advantages of the proposed system include: 1) By using both stationary and mobile agents, it achieves scalability, bandwidth-efficiency, configurability and upgradeability; 2) Formal methods are used in agent generation, which can reduce the design and implementation errors; 3) Existing intrusion detection mechanisms/algorithms can be easily integrated into our system; and 4) Efficient between-agent communication security and trust management mechanisms will be developed to ensure system reliability and security.