Design and implementation of an embedded intrusion detection system for wireless applications

The exponential growth in wireless network faults, vulnerabilities and attacks makes the wireless local area network (WLAN) security management a challenging research area. In this study, a new embedded wireless intrusion detection system (WIDS) is designed and implemented in order to protect a multi-services wireless network. The proposed WIDS must be in small size in order to be integrated in different wireless devices, low cost in order to be placed in many places and has good performance to cover the data rate of the WLAN. All these attributes are achieved by network processor, and Ubicom network processor is used to implement the proposed WIDS. Different implementations of the proposed intrusion detection system are suggested and various searching algorithms are tested on an experimental platform. Finally, the WIDS approach is validated by experimenting with ten different types of attacks. The experimental results obtained from this work indicate that the proposed WIDS can worked efficiently at IEEE 802.11b WLAN network which provides different services to its clients with data rate ranges between 1.08 and 9.24 Mbps, and memory capacity of 250 rules.