The rate of false alarms was significantly lower than that of competing systems, and when the system was presented with simulated attacks, it detected all of the common security breaches it was tested against. Dr Forrest plans to extend her approach to other aspects of computer security in particular by automating the response to an alarm, rather than relying on human intervention. And, she suggests, computer-security specialists will increasingly borrow from biology as software continues to become more complicated. Rather than treating software and networks with a rigid, engineering mindset, she thinks it is more realistic to see them as ecosystems. As a result, she suggests that large programs such as operating systems should be made in such a way that no two copies are exactly alike.
Monocultures are, after all, more susceptible to being wiped out by disease than mixed fields.
Dr Chess speculates, for example, that bug fixes to existing programs might be delivered automatically in the future as tiny patches, in a manner reminiscent of gene therapy. But digital immune systems should make it easier to keep up with this evolution by automatically devising new forms of defence, as happens in a real immune system. And by exploiting the Internet to distribute the cures to computer diseases, such systems offer a promising way to prevent outbreaks from becoming epidemics. The Economist Newspaper Limited. Write a relevant article about cybertech or cyberculture and email it to us.