Profile-Based security against malicious mobile agents

In this paper we describe a security system against malicious agents in a wireless ad hoc network. This system monitors the activities of mobile agents. By mining the log data, the system builds dynamic behavioral profiles for each class of agents. The profiles are then used to classify each agent instance and detect anomalous agents. The malicious nature of identified anomalous agents are further determined by a threat assessment module. For mobile agent profiling, we presented two approaches: one based on rule-learning and another on histograms of features related each agent class. We have implemented a prototype system using the histogram-based approach. The prototype is also described in the paper.