Artificial immune system architecture for computer security applications

With increased global interconnectivity, reliance on e-commerce, network services, and Internet communication, computer security has become a necessity. Organizations must protect their systems from intrusion and computer-virus attacks. Such protection must detect anomalous patterns by exploiting known signatures while monitoring normal computer programs and network usage for abnormalities. Current antivirus and net- work intrusion detection (ID) solutions can become overwhelmed by the burden of capturing and classifying new viral stains and intrusion patterns. To overcome this problem, a self-adaptive dis- tributed agent-based defense immune system based on biological strategies is developed within a hierarchical layered architecture. A prototype interactive system is designed, implemented in Java, and tested. The results validate the use of a distributed-agent bio- logical-system approach toward the computer-security problems of virus elimination and ID.