An IDS First Line of Defense for Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc networks arouse imminently an important interest within industrial and research communities. Actually, their salient features, essentially the absence of infrastructure and auto-management, promise huge applications and possibilities for wireless communication. However, the tremendous boom of these networks depends incontestably on their reliability in terms of security and quality of services (QoS). In this paper, we study the ad hoc security vulnerabilities for which cryptographic-based solutions are ineffective and which require IDS. Appropriate designed IDS services appear essential as countermeasures to those threats, where previous IDS proposals often seem to be too sophisticated in the ad hoc environment and merely ineffective. Our goal here is to provide an IDS mechanism dedicated to the OLSR protocol, fitting to its characteristics and operation, and designed to avoid its vulnerabilities. Hence, our proposed IDS represents an urgent and primary line of defense since it protects from the protocol flaws themselves avoiding a significant panoply of easily operated attacks.