A Computationally Efficient Method for Joint Authentication and Intrusion Detection in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Continuous authentication is an important prevention-based approach to protect high security mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). On the other hand, intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are also important in MANETs to effectively identify malicious activities. Considering these two approaches jointly is effective in optimal security design taking into account system security requirements and resource constraints in MANETs. To obtain the optimal scheme of combining continuous authentication and IDSs in a distributed manner, we formulate the problem as a partially observable distributed stochastic system. We present structural results for this problem in order to decrease computational complexity, making our solution usable in large networks. The policies derived from structural results are easy to implement in practical MANETs. Simulation results are presented to show the performance of this method for the proposed scheme.