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Strategies: Mother Nature Recruited for War on Cyber Terror |
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By Mike Martin
NewsFactor Network
Adapting the idea of diversity in biology to computers may not make an individual computer more resilient to attack, says Carnegie Mellon professor Dawn Song, but it aims to make the whole population of computers more resilient in aggregate.
It's not nice to fool Mother Nature, but scientists who are fooling with the mechanisms of Mother Nature's wrath are developing a clever tool to fend off malicious viruses, slippery worms, and other nasty cyber attacks.
In nature, diseases are most devastating when an infection-causing organism encounters a 'monoculture' -- a vast swath of genetically similar individuals, each susceptible to the organism's method of attack, said National Science Foundation (NSF) spokesperson David Hart, whose organization is supporting research toward winning the mother of all cyber wars.
Computer viruses and worms exploit the same flaw on computers that all run the same software, Hart explained.
Hard Driving Diseases
As a way to prevent diseases of the hard drive, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of New Mexico are collaborating on an NSF-supported project to study cyber-diversity for computer systems.
Mother Nature counters infectious organisms and genetic diseases with bio-diversity -- the reason cousins should not marry.
We are looking at computers the way a physician would look at genetically related patients, each susceptible to the same disorder, said Carnegie Mellon professor of electrical and computer engineering Mike Reiter. In a more diverse population, one member may fall victim to a pathogen or disorder, while another might not have the same vulnerability, he told NewsFactor.
Individuality as Self-Defense
Our project seeks to reduce computer vulnerability by automatically changing certain aspects of a computer's software, added Dawn Song, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon.
Internet worms can use a single vulnerability to cause major havoc. Code Red, for example, infected over 350,000 systems in just 13 hours.
Cyber diversity diverts attackers because they have to approach each computer -- and software version -- differently. No longer would there be a single vulnerability subject to a single attack protocol or strategy.
Adapting the idea of diversity in biology to computers may not make an individual computer more resilient to attack, but it aims to make the whole population of computers more resilient in aggregate, Song told NewsFactor.
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