Model-Based Evaluation of Distributed Intrusion Detection Protocols for Mobile Group Communication Systems

Under highly security vulnerable, resource-restricted, and dynamically changing mobile ad hoc environments, it is critical to be able to maximize the system lifetime while bounding the communication response time for mission-oriented mobile groups. In this paper, we analyze the tradeoff of security versus performance for distributed intrusion detection protocols employed in mobile group communication systems (GCSs). We investigate a distributed voting-based intrusion detection protocol for GCSs in multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks and examine the effect of intrusion detection on system survivability measured by the mean time to security failure (MTTSF) metric and efficiency measured by the communication cost metric. We identify optimal design settings under which the MTTSF metric can be best traded off for the communication cost metric or vice versa. We conduct extensive simulation to validate analytical results obtained. This work provides a general model-based evaluation framework for developing and analyzing intrusion detection protocols that can dynamically adapt to changing attacker strengths with the goal of system lifetime optimization and/or communication cost minimization.