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A Taxonomy of Bio-Inspired Cyber Security Approaches: Existing Techniques and Future Directions

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Abstract

After decades of deploying cyber security systems, it is a well-known fact that the existing cyber infrastructure has numerous inherent limitations that make the maintenance of the current network security devices un-scalable and provide the adversary with asymmetric advantages. These limitations include: (1) difficulty in obtaining the global knowledge due to the lack of mutual interactions among network devices, (2) no sense of self-awareness, (3) absence of self-correcting/organizing mechanisms; for instance, error-prone and time-consuming manual configuration, which is not effective in real-time attack mitigation, (4) disability to diagnose mis-configuration and conflict resolution due to multiparty management of security infrastructure. Biological systems, on the other hand, have intrinsic appealing characteristics as a result of billions of years of evolution, such as adaptivity to varying environmental conditions, inherent resiliency to failures and damages, successful and collaborative operation on the basis of a limited set of rules with global intelligence (which is larger than superposition of individuals). The aim of this survey is to review the existing bio-inspired approaches that have been used toward addressing the aforementioned issues and evaluate them accordingly. We also aim to provide information about the intrinsic potential of existing bio-inspired techniques which has not been explored yet, for improving cyber security.

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  1. Department of Software and Information Systems, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

    Usman Rauf

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Rauf, U. A Taxonomy of Bio-Inspired Cyber Security Approaches: Existing Techniques and Future Directions. Arab J Sci Eng 43, 6693–6708 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-018-3117-2

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