Immune systems: some reading in the light of CodeGreen and CleanCR

From: emerson.c.tanat_private
Date: Wed Sep 05 2001 - 17:07:12 PDT

  • Next message: Stanley G. Bubrouski: "Re: CodeGreen beta release (idq-patcher/antiCodeRed/etc.)"

    Hello Everyone,
    
    I've been looking at the CodeGreen thread and it has made me revisit some
    old ideas about automatic/autonomous responses to worms and Virii. While
    CodeGreen and CleanCR are interesting in and of themselves, the idea of an
    anti-worm worm is not new, nor is the idea of a digital immune system
    modeled on that of vertebrate animals.
    
    These immune systems have to cope with all sorts of threats that a
    particular individual creature has not faced before, and the way that those
    immune systems pass on immunity to cells (or in this case machines or
    nodes) has spured some thinking.
    
    I suggest people interested in these ideas look at:
    
    http://www.sciam.com/1197issue/1197kephart.html
    
    and have a look at the article. Something like what they describe would be
    a good general case solution for things like Code Red, were it to be
    implemented widely and in an open source fashion. Widespread systems such
    as the immune system as described would also be able to communicate to each
    other, potentially walling off an outbreak before it even hit the wider
    internet, thus allowing unpatched machines to go on functioning normally
    until their own local immune system patched them in due course.
    
    Anyways, it's an interesting paper, and the 1995 paper cited is well worth
    reading.
    
    Emerson
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