Applying Mobile Agents

Nearly all present-day commercial intrusion detection systems are based on a hierarchical architecture. In such an architecture, the root node is responsible for detecting intrusions and for issuing responses. However, an intrusion detection system (IDS) based on a hierarchical architecture has many single points of failure. For example, by disabling the root node, the intrusion-detection function of the IDS will also be disabled. To solve this problem, an IDS inspired by the human immune system is proposed. The proposed IDS has no single component that is responsible for detecting intrusions. Instead, the intrusion-detection function is divided and placed within mobile agents. Mobile agents act similarly to white blood cells of the human immune system and travel from host to host in the network to detect intrusions. The IDS is fault-tolerant because it can continue to detect intrusions even when most of its components have been disabled.