Intrusion detection system based on mobile agent

This paper presents an intrusion detection system (IDS) based on mobile agents that detect intrusion from outside the network segment as well as from inside. A main program, being a typical intrusion detection system residing at a server, creates mobile agents called Aglets and dispatches them to the remote hosts of the network. The agents trace and detect the network traffic and look for abnormal activities by matching against a limited set of signature patterns supplied by the main machine. The agents are programmed with enough intelligence to decide whether to send the logged data (captured packets) to the main machine for further analysis. The proposed model comprises two major components: the Intrusion Detection Component with the Mobile Agent Platform, and distributed intelligent mobile agents. Finally, we present the experimental results obtained from an early prototype and a discussion of design and implementation issues, and directions for future work.