Computer Immunodeficiency: Analogy between Computer Security and HIV

Current security systems are designed to prevent foreseeable attacks. Those security systems do not prevent effectively the more emergent types of attacks, like a botnet, whose presence and behavior is difficult to predict. In order to predominate those types of attacks, we advocate an adaptive security approach based on the animal immune system. But since those sophisticated attacks can also be directed at the security systems themselves, leading to computer immunodeficiency, like HIV, in this paper we propose a protocol that protects the immune system itself. This approach discriminates between attacks on the security systems, which are part of the computer immune system, and attacks on other vital computer systems in an information infrastructure.