computers


Uwe Aickelin is a scientist of the Nottingham University. He directs a team which develops an immune system for the computer networks. This system tries to copy the human body's reactions!

Indeed, in the team, you'll also find Stave Cayzer, Steve Cayzer, a computational neuroscientist (!!) at HP Labs in Bristol and Julie McLeod,an immunologist at the University of the West of England in Bristol.

In the past, such research was already existing but was focused on applications that supervised a network in the same way the white globules supervise external molecules: seek, find, kill...

In our case, Uwe and his team took into account many anomalies of our immune system, such as, for example, the lack of response to proteins introduced into the food or the presence of a foetus.
Result: these guys modelled a system, based on the dendritic cells, which fights only external agents causing real problems. A threshold must be exceeded a threshold so that an action is taken: a considerable increase of the traffic or error messages.
An unique PC checking its IP address IP to know if it's online will be well detected as being a fake alarm (don't worry) while an attack of million pings will flash the red lamp of ICT, with the siren and all the stuff...

Source : NewScientistTech, middle of May.
For those who do not know: A dendritic cell is an antigen-presenting leukocyte that is found in the skin, mucosa, and lymphoid tissues and that initiates a primary immune response by activating lymphocytes and secreting cytokines.