Using Nature and Bio-inspired Technologies for Building Innovative Proactive Security Mechanisms

The current security scheme can be characterized mainly as reactive rather than proactive. Prevention security mechanisms can however provide significant advantages in today´s computer based systems. Nature is an inspiration pool for such innovative proactive mechanisms and has given birth to several bio-inspired technologies. One such technology is artificial immune systems (AIS). AIS aim to use proactive mechanisms inspired by the natural immune system on several applications, including computerized systems. Since the natural immune system can be viewed as a defense system, the appropriate transfer of immune mechanisms to our computerized defense systems is of great interest. In this paper we introduce the main conceptual design approach of AIS. We analyze the negative selection algorithm (NSA) which is one of the basic immune algorithms and we discuss several improvements to its design. Finally, we introduce the proposed autonomous detector NSA algorithm and argue its suitability and advantages when used for computer security applications.