An analysis of security solutions for ARP poisoning attacks and its effects on medical computing

Network utilization reached its maximum level due to the availability of high-end technologies in the least cost. This enabled the network users to share the sensitive information like account details, patient records, genomics details for biomedical research and defence details leading to cyber-war. Data are vulnerable at any level of communication. The link-layer Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is initiated for any data communication to take place among the hosts in a LAN. Because of the stateless nature of this protocol, it has been misused for illegitimate activities. These activities lead to the most devasting attacks like Denial of Service, Man-in-the-Middle, host impersonation, sniffing, and cache poisoning. Though various host-based and network-based intrusion detection/prevention techniques exist, they fail to provide a complete solution for this type of poisoning. This paper analyzes the existing defence systems against ARP attacks and proposes three different techniques for detecting and preventing the ARP attacks. The three techniques ensure security of traditional ARP and its impact in Medical computing where a single bit inversion could lead to wrong diagnosis.