A Vision of an Adaptive Artificial Immune System

Natural immune systems are sophisticated information processors. They learn to recognize relevant patterns, they remember patterns that have been seen previously, they use combinatorics to construct pattern detectors efficiently, and they use diversity to promote robustness. Further, the individual cells and molecules that comprise the immune system are distributed throughout our bodies, encoding and controlling the system in parallel with no central control mechanism.

The talk will describe recent progress on several related projects which are incorporating principles and mechanisms from immunology into computer security. It will emphasize recent work on network-based intrusion detection in which normal behavior (self) is characterized using TCP/IP packets. Several immune-inspired mechanisms are employed to create a distributed and robust approach to network security, and an outline of future extensions to make the system more immunological will be given.