Challenges of Misbehavior Detection in Industrial Wireless Networks

In recent years, wireless technologies are increasingly adopted in many application domains that were either unconnected before or exclusively used cable networks. This paradigm shift towards – often ad-hoc – wireless communication has led to significant benefits in terms of flexibility and mobility. Alongside with these benefits, however, arise new attack vectors, which cannot be mitigated by traditional security measures. Hence, mechanisms that are orthogonal to cryptographic security techniques are necessary in order to detect adversaries. In traditional networks, such mechanisms are subsumed under the term “intrusion detection system,” and many proposals have been implemented for different application domains. More recently, the term “misbehavior detection” has been coined to encompass detection mechanisms especially for attacks in wireless networks. In this paper, we use industrial wireless networks as an exemplary application domain to discuss new directions and future challenges in detecting insider attacks. To that end, we review existing work on intrusion detection in mobile ad-hoc networks. We focus on physical-layer-based detection mechanisms as these are a particularly interesting research direction that had not been reasonable before widespread use of wireless technology.