

Ants inspire new computer antivirus software - edw519
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6237414/Ants-inspire-new-computer-antivirus-software.html

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mbowcock
Interesting - curious how they are actually implementing the 'digital ants'. I
think there is a lot of potential in modeling systems after nature.

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dbz
I would be too. As for the ants- they would have to be giant ants in my point
of view. Able to sniff if something _out of the thousands of somethings_ is
wrong. And if they are all equal detectors, then everything would get a strong
trail or no trail. And wouldn't those trails build up bigger and bigger over
the years until something not a threat becomes "scented" into a giant one? AND
if all of the ants have different strengths, then one and will miss a threat
and wont put a very important scent _marking_ on it...

uhg. I guess I am just a pessimist when it comes to this approach of
protection. It seems like it will take up space and memory and wont be
particularly effective even though real life ants seem to survive a-okay

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krisneuharth
I work with similar systems in another domain. You would use different scents
to mark different indicators of an attack. To prevent build up you would
evaporate the scents over time, possibly at different rates. Each ant is a
simple agent that is equal in capability although it is possible to have
different specializations for some ants. The real power of swarming systems is
their simplicity.

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dbz
That makes sense- but I guess what I failed to say was that all of the ants
need to go over the same information, which is basically just a system scan
taking a longer amount of time and not at once, which would just lower
available ram- and I can use a LOT of ram at times.

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krisneuharth
I see what you are saying. I think the value of the swarm here is the rapidly
adaptive nature of the system when there are so many agents. I don't really
know what the overhead is for this approach compared to a normal virus
scanner. I looked around on the Wake Forest CS site trying to find a paper
describing their approach but I didn't come up with much except for a more
detailed article and a list of publications by the researcher.

<http://www.wfu.edu/wowf/2009/20090921.ants.html>

<http://www.cs.wfu.edu/~fulp/ewfpub.html#securityPublications>

I imagine that the grad students mentioned in the article will be documenting
this research as part of their theses. I am interested to see what they have
to say, my company has looked at similar ideas in intrusion detection a little
in the past.

EDIT: I found this paper at the PNNL site:

[http://www.pnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_repo...](http://www.pnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_reports/PNNL-17868.pdf)

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juvenn
Wars of Ants vs Worms?

