The implications of immunology for secure systems design

The immune system can be a powerful model for understanding and improving computer security. In this article we explore the analogy, starting with a description of early work at discovering "peptides" for computer systems in the form of sequences of system calls, and moving on to the implications of immunology for secure systems design. In particular, we discuss how the immune system tolerates errors, and how we can borrow these ideas to improve the robustness of our computer systems. We observe that a key aspect of the biology is that the immune system and the body have co-evolved so that the body is easier to protect; what we need is a similar co-evolution of computer systems and the methods we use to secure them. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.