A Multiagent Self-healing System against Security Incidents in MANETs

Roberto Magán-Carrión; José Camacho; Pedro García-Teodoro

Abstract:

Few proposals exist in the literature where security in networks and communications is studied from a pro-active perspective. One of them is MARS, a self-healing system intended to mitigate the malicious effects of common threats in MANETs. MARS makes use of special agent nodes to recover the loss of connectivity due to the operation of malicious nodes in the environment. Despite the general good performance of MARS, this paper shows some situations in which it does not work properly. This is caused by an inappropriate behavior of the optimization objective function considered in MARS. To overcome this limitation, a couple of alternative functions are designed and evaluated. The effectiveness of the new proposals is validated through extensive experiments. The new optimization functions lead to an increase in the resilience and tolerance of the network against security threats, improving network survivability.

Research areas:

Year:

2014

Type of Publication:

In Proceedings

Keywords:

Agent; connectivity; malicious; MANET; optimization; response; security; threat; self-healing; survivability; tolerance

Volume:

430

Book title:

Workshop on Active Security through Multi-Agent Systems (WASMAS), 12th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (PAAMS 2014)

Series: