A bio-inspired approach for self-protecting an organic middleware with artificial antibodies

Abstract. Our human body is well protected by antibodies from our biological immune system. This protection system matured over millions of years and has proven its functionality. In our research we are going to transfer some techniques of a biological immune system to a computer based environment. Our goal is to design a self-protecting middleware which is not vulnerable to malicious events. First off this paper proposes an artificial immune system and evaluates optimal parameter settings. This shows the correlation between the size of a system and the length of the receptors used within antibodies for an efficient detection. Our tests showed that the recognition rate of unknown malicious objects can reach up to 99%. Further on we describe the integration of the immune system into our organic middleware OCµ and afterwards we propose techniques to minimize the memory space needed for storing the antibodies and to speedup the time needed for detecting malicious messages. We obtained a space minimization by 30 % and gained a speedup of 30 with execution time optimization.