Structural Results for Combined Continuous User Authentication and Intrusion Detection in High Security Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Continuous user 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 user authentication and IDSs in a distributed manner, we formulate the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) multi-armed bandit problem. We present a structural results method to solve the problem for a large network with a variety of nodes. The policies derived from structural results are easy to implement in practical MANETs. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness and the performance of the proposed scheme.