What can biology really offer computer security?

Biological systems can offer computer security insights into how to engineer more effective artificial systems. While the authors believe this statement to be fundamentally true, it is unhelpfully vague what insights exactly? This paper argues that, in the light of recent paradigm shifts in a number of fields, a key insight biology can give us is a number of concrete engineering principles, in particular concerning the range of input data made available to a constructed system, and the nature of the processing that is performed on this input data. This paper first discusses these principles from a theoretical perspective in relation to current and previous work across a number of fields. In the second half of the paper the results of the authors’ own ongoing research, an initial attempt at designing, implementing and testing a prototype intrusion detection system based on these principles, are presented.