Title:
Web of Security: Cooperative
Internet Security Systems
Abstract:Many organizations are forced to widen
their scope and to conduct their business on a global scale in order to keep
up with the competitors. At the same time they are enlarging their networks
and information systems to support their new business. It becomes more and
more difficult to manage the vulnerabilities of those large distributed information
systems. The traditional reactive behavior of security systems is expected
not to be able to keep up with the complexity present in the new interconnected
information systems and the emerging sophisticated attacks. Instead of having
a few security systems, though well-equipped, waiting passively and to be
surprised by each new attack or random failure, a new way of thinking about
how to be security threats one step ahead is needed. Such a new way of thinking
is inspired on complex adaptive systems and involves the idea of solving
complexity by the individual constituents of the complex system itself. The
constituents are the multiple security systems on the Internet that cooperate
to achieve an integrated defense system. Self-defending information systems
based on self-organization is as such proposed in this paper. Such a web
of security is more effective since it is able to memorize, recognize and
to adapt to new types of threats. It is also expected to be more efficient
since each new threat is immediately dealt with by the system itself. Such
a system is also more efficient as fewer resources are needed compared to
traditional methods. Traditional methods require a new module or update for
each threat (IDS, virus scanner, etc), whereas with self-organization the
systems reconfigures itself after that all the means for defense and configurations
have been settled once. In this paper we will present a design of such an
integrated self-organizing defense system.
Author: Semir Daskapan