PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD Copying from Mother Nature, security researchers have come up with a new means of detecting and thwarting computer worms and other malware. Their inspiration: the ant.
An individual ant may not seem impressive, but ants are a highly successful species because they work collectively. Similarly, the security scheme, called Cooperative Infrastructure Defense (CID), relies on small pieces of code that wander across a network relaying information to one another – so-called “swarm intelligence -- the better to identify, surround and destroy security threats.
“The designs in nature are far superior to what we come up with in science and engineering,” said Glenn Fink, a research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Wash. Bees and wasps also had lessons to teach, said Fink, who collaborated on CID with scientists from Wake Forest University. PNNL is a research laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy
Like an ant colony the relationships between the different bits of code in CID is hierarchical. Each digital ant, or sensor, is a mobile agent that wanders across a network sending its intelligence to higher level, or “sentinel,” where it can be evaluated and sent to a still higher level, the “sergeant,” to be presented to human managers who may observe the problem and take corrective action.
Each sensor looks for any of 60 different kinds of information. One sensor may identify how many connections a computer has made in the last minute; another may identify how fast log files are being written to; another may identify how many files are open. A sensor will flag an unusual condition, such as 8,000 network connections per minute – a sign that a bot may have taken over a computer.
When a problem is spotted the sensors leave behind digital “pheromones,” tiny bits of code that point the way for other sensors to potential problem areas. By following the pheromones, a swarm of ants can converge on a suspected problem to identify and report on a number of different problem characteristics.
In one experiment a network of 64 Linux systems was intentionally infected with a worm. The CID system detected and diagnosed the problem within minutes, Fink said.
The sensors and pheromones themselves could clog up a system if left unchecked. Therefore, the pheromones are programmed to decay and disappear over time and the ants also will expire if they are not actively reporting problems after a certain time.
“We’re trying to be an autonomic defense system. Even though adversaries are changing, we’ll be able to keep up,” said Fink.
CID is not designed for individual consumers, but for organizations that have a number of computers on a network. Work on the project has been going on for about three years. The code is not yet commercially available, but Fink said it may be released on an open-source basis.
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