Noria Foukia

Self-organisation: paradigms and applications

A self-organising system functions without central control, and through contextual local interactions. Components achieve a simple task individually, but a complex collective behaviour emerges from their mutual interactions. Such a system modifies its structure and functionality to adapt to changes to requirements and to the environment based on previous experience. Nature provides examples of self-organisation, such as ants food foraging, molecules formation, or antibodies detection. Similarly, current software applications are driven by social interactions (negotiations, transactions), based on autonomous entities or agents, and run in highly dynamic environments. The issue of engineering applications, based on the principles of self-organisation to achieve robustness and adaptability, is gaining increasing interest in the software research community. The aim of this paper is to survey natural and artificial complex systems exhibiting emergent behaviour, and to outline the mechanisms enabling such behaviours.

IDReAM: intrusion detection and response executed with agent mobility

Nowadays, lots of researches in Intrusion Detection and Intrusion Response try to find new solutions to circumvent new intrusive behaviors. One of the principal weaknesses of these systems is the lack of robustness inherent in their centralized nature. Even though most of the existing Intrusion Detection and Response Systems (IDRSystems) use distributed data collection (host-based or network-based) many of them continue to perform data analysis centrally, thereby limiting scalability. Moreover, even if the IDRSystem is distributed in the network, its deployed elements generally remain static. With the means available to modern attackers, such as automated intrusion tools, these static and distributed elements are easily accessible. Often, this does not always contribute to improving the reliability and resistance to attacks of such static components. This paper presents our approach for building an IDRSystem called Intrusion Detection and Response extended with Agent Mobility or IDReAM for short. IDReAM combines Mobile Agents (MAs) with self-organizing paradigms inspired by natural life systems. This approach was already announced in a preceding paper [4], and the present paper describes in a more detailed way the conceptual model. All the research works relating to IDReAM are gathered in a PhD Thesis [3] which also contains the implementation results of the model and its evaluation. The present paper is limited only to the model.

Combining Immune Systems and Social Insect Metaphors: A Paradigm for Distributed Intrusion Detection and Response System

Given the ongoing evolution and broadening of network environments, one should reconsider computer security from a new point of view. Indeed, the increasing transparency of network connections is a wide open door to new kinds of distributed attacks exploiting, among others, the inherent flaws of TCP/IP.

Managing computer networks security through self-organization: a complex system perspective

The present paper proposes a new perspective to deal with computer networks security. Networks can be viewed as complex systems that exhibit self-organization and self-control properties. These properties are well suited for todays open networks like the Internet. In such uncertain environment as the Internet, ensuring survivability is a hard task. A parallel is made with natural life systems that also have to survive external aggression and that also exhibit complex system characteristics. This paper describes our research work dealing with complex architecture for Intrusion Detection and Response System (IDRS). In the perspective of complex systems, the proposed IDRS presents self-organization characteristics based on interaction between single entities. These entities are implemented using Mobile Agents (MAs) that incarnate a complex artificial ecosystem to detect and to answer intrusions.