Development of a network intrusion detection system (NIDS) for smartphones

• Main Author: Muhammad Raafiq Mohd Raffi
• Other Authors: Chan Chee Keong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/75262
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Smartphones are emerging as a type of mobile device which provides “all-in-one” convenience by integrating traditional mobile phone functionality and the functionality of a handheld computer. Users rely on their smartphones for private and business activities such as web browsing, checking emails and online banking which makes them prime targets for attackers to carry out malicious activities. This brings forth the importance of employing similar protection measures used on computers for smartphones. A Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) monitors and detects any malicious activity on a network. Due to smartphones having access to multitudes of networks, establishing a physical NIDS at each access point is ineffective due to the cost and time to setup and maintain. In this paper, a framework for a NIDS for smartphones is proposed using cloud technology and Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology. The VPN server on the cloud machine acts a common access point for the network traffic of connected smartphones to flow through which enables the NIDS to monitor the network. This allows smartphones to utilize the NIDS in the form of a Software as a Service (SaaS) regardless of location. Several network attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) are performed to test the effectiveness of the framework. The results demonstrated the feasibility of the framework with the NIDS performing accurately and real-time attacks being detected successfully.