Cloud Intrusion Detection and Prevention System for M-Voting Application in South Africa: Suricata vs. Snort

Abstract

Information and Communication Technology is giving rise to new technologies and solutions that were not possible a few years ago. Electronic voting is one of the technologies that has emerged. One of the subsets of e-voting is mobile voting. Mobile voting is the use of mobile phones to cast a vote outside the restricted electoral boundaries. Mobile phones are pervasive; they offer connection anywhere, at any time. However, utilising a fast-growing medium such as the mobile phone to cast a vote, poses various security threats and challenges such as viruses, Trojans and worms. Many approaches for mobile phone security were based on running a lightweight intrusion detection software on the mobile phone. Nevertheless, such security solutions failed to provide effective protection as they are constrained by the limited memory, storage and computational resources of mobile phones. This paper compared and evaluated two intrusion detection and prevention systems named Suricata and Snort to equate, among the two security systems the one suitable to secure mobile voting application called XaP, while casting a vote. Simulations were used to evaluate the two security systems and results indicated that Suricata is more effective, reliable, accurate and secure than Snort when comes to protecting XaP.