A Network Protection Framework through Artificial Immunity

TL;DR

This paper proposes SANA, a distributed network protection system inspired by the human immune system, featuring collaborative artificial immune cells for adaptive, efficient, and robust intrusion defense.

Contribution

It introduces a novel immune-inspired architecture for network security, emphasizing collaboration, self-management, and redundancy reduction, with a proof-of-concept implementation.

Findings

SANA offers improved intrusion protection over traditional systems.

The system demonstrates adaptive self-management capabilities.

Performance evaluation shows resource efficiency and robustness.

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 {\it 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 redundancies. We introduce a library of several novel and common used protection components and evaluate the performance of SANA by a proof-of-concept implementation.