Immuno-inspired autonomic system for cyber defense

The biological immune system is an autonomic system for self-protection, which has evolved over millions of years probably through extensive redesigning, testing, tuning and optimization process. The powerful information processing capabilities of the immune system, such as feature extraction, pattern recognition, learning, memory, and its distributive nature provide rich metaphors for its artificial counterpart. Our study focuses on building an autonomic defense system, using some immunological metaphors for information gathering, analyzing, decision making and launching threat and attack responses. This on-going research effort is not to mimic the nature but to explore and learn valuable lessons useful for self-adaptive cyber defense systems.