SANA - Network Protection through artificial Immunity

TL;DR

SANA is a distributed network protection system inspired by the human immune system, featuring collaborative artificial immune cells that enhance security, adaptability, and resource efficiency compared to traditional isolated protection components.

Contribution

This work introduces SANA, a novel cooperative, immune-inspired network protection architecture with a library of protection components and demonstrated performance improvements.

Findings

SANA provides better intrusion protection than traditional systems.

The system achieves adaptive self-management and resource efficiency.

Performance is validated through a proof-of-concept implementation.

Abstract

Current network protection systems use a collection of intelligent components - e.g. classifiers or rule-based firewall systems to detect intrusions and anomalies and to secure a network against viruses, worms, or trojans. However, these network systems rely on individuality and support an architecture with less collaborative work of the protection components. They give less administration support for maintenance, but offer a large number of individual single points of failures - an ideal situation for network attacks to succeed. In this work, we discuss the required features, the performance, and the problems of a distributed protection system called SANA. It consists of a cooperative architecture, it is motivated by the human immune system, where the components correspond to artificial immune cells that are connected for their collaborative work. SANA promises a better protection against intruders than common known protection systems through an adaptive self-management while keeping the resources efficiently by an intelligent reduction of redundant tasks. We introduce a library of several novel and common used protection components and evaluate the performance of SANA by a proof-of-concept implementation.