Bio-Cyber Operations Inspired by the Human Immune System

Headnote

Abstract: Bio-Cyber operation is a new field of research that is inspired by the Human Immune System. The human body has found solutions for problems that cybersecurity professionals have been trying to resolve for the past few decades. Cybersecurity should draw lessons from the human immune system on how to detect and deter attacks. Systems and devices are likely to leak sensitive information or data. A 'cyber immune' technology can be used to detect unknown cyber-attacks and provide a powerful mechanism for defence. In this paper we focus on work that describes the recent advances on Bi°Cyber operations, and we present our conceptual cyber operations model. By looking into the field of human biology we aspire to provide significant insight into the bio-cybersecurity domain.

Keywords: Bio-Cyber operation, human immune system, biological-inspired computing

1. Introduction

2020 has been an unprecedented time in our lifetime. Cybersecurity incidents are on the rise, with threat agents targeting crisis-related assets. We speculate that threat agents are taking advantage of new opportunities that have been created due to the changes in the operational framework of companies around the world. Threat agents are those individuals or groups of people that can manifest a threat (Vidalis and Jones, 2003).

The notion of threat can be defined as the function of a threat agent exploiting a vulnerability of an asset. An asset is a thing (or a service) that either now or in the future can generate or has the potential to generate (directly or indirectly) revenue for the business (Vidalis and Jones, 2003).

Today, our society is depended on the Global Information Environment (GIE). Cyber-attacks can happen instantly. Modern threats, for example zero-days and Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) poses very serious risk to the GIE. The Internet of Things (IoT), where cyber-physical systems cooperate and communicate with each other, presents devices and systems that usually use firmware or legacy code that was not improved with cyber threats in mind (Bhopi and Dongre, 2016).

As we continue to embrace and use all the benefits of the cyber operation, we need to move to a more secure world that focuses on behaviours within a network to identify normal behaviours from abnormal behaviours both at the group and individual level.

The aim of trying to...