Integrated innate and adaptive artificial immune systems applied to process anomaly detection

This thesis explores the design and application of artificial immune systems (AISs), problem-solving systems inspired by the human and other immune systems. AISs to date have largely been modelled on the biological adaptive immune system and have taken little inspiration from the innate immune system. The first part of this thesis examines the biological innate immune system, which controls the adaptive immune system. The importance of the innate immune system suggests that AISs should also incorporate models of the innate immune system as well as the adaptive immune system. This thesis presents and discusses a number of design principles for AISs which are modelled on both innate and adaptive immunity. These novel design principles provided a structured framework for developing AISs which incorporate innate and adaptive immune systems in general. These design principles are used to build a software system which allows such AISs to be implemented and explored. AISs, as well as being inspired by the biological immune system, are also built to solve problems. In this thesis, using the software system and design principles we have developed, we implement several novel AISs and apply them to the problem of detecting attacks on computer systems. These AISs monitor programs running on a computer and detect whether the program is behaving abnormally or being attacked. The development of these AISs shows in more detail how AISs built on the design principles can be instantiated. In particular, we show how the use of AISs which incorporate both innate and adaptive immune system mechanisms can be used to reduce the number of false alerts and improve the performance of current approaches.