Insights from Nature for Cybersecurity

Abstract

The alarming rise in the quantity of malware in the last few years poses a serious challenge to the security community and requires urgent response. However, current countermeasures seem to be no longer effective. Thus, it is our belief that it is now time for researchers and security experts to turn to nature in the search for novel inspirations for defense systems. Nature has provided species with a whole range of offensive and defensive techniques, which have been developing and improving in the course of billions of years of evolution. The extremely diverse living conditions have promoted a large variation in the devised bio-security solutions. In this paper we introduce a novel PROTECTION framework in which common denominators of the encountered offensive and defensive means are proposed and presented. The bio-inspired solutions are discussed in the context of cybersecurity, where some principles have already been adopted. The deployment of the whole nature-based framework should aid the design and improvement process of modern cyber-defense systems.