Abstract
One of the great contributions to humanity was the discovery of the vaccine. Dr. Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur share this honorable credit. Without adaptive immunity, one fourth of the human race would have been terminally ill. Building a Digital Immune System to combat cyber malware is one of the most innovative ideas that will soon become reality. This is the story of the digital Smart Vaccine.
Introduction
This paper brings a new dimension into cyber security continuum. It describes the blueprint and the conceptual design strategy of intelligent system called the Cognitive Early Warning Predictive System™ (CEWPS). CEWPS™ is the new Digital Immune System (DIS) because it follows the Human Immune System (HIS), in other words, it is the counterpart of Human Immune system and applied solely to the digital world. CEWPS will be equipped with an ultra-fast broadband grid that will be used to accommodate heavy alert traffic, attack data and vaccination services. CEWPS is fully autonomic in handling surprise attacks (particularly for the critical infrastructure systems), and designed to predict incoming massive attacks and issue “just-in-time alerts to trigger a defense
response. All this magic is done with the help of an autonomic agent that we call “The Smart
Vaccine™”. Once the viral attack is recognized, an early warning alert is broadcast throughout the (DIS) grid. The Smart Vaccine quickly performs its “acquired Immunity” function by delivering the proper vaccine and inoculating all systems on the grid. The attack is nullified and normal operations are transparently resumed. Subsequently, the attack episode is documented and stored in the Knowledge Base for vaccination support against future attacks.
There are two technical justifications for building the CEWPS™/SV. The first reason is the accelerated proliferation of cybercrime and cyber terrorism. Graph-A simply shows the accelerated progression and sophistication of malware vis-à-vis Anti-Virus Technologies. Malware engineers have succeeded to craft diabolical rootkits and dismantle anti-virus code and make the most venomous payload to contaminate the world with.
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The second reason is that the State-of-the-art of Anti-Virus Technologies (AVT) is suffering from an innovation stagnation. AVT is still struggling with first level malware such as SPAM, Phishing and ID Theft. Trojans such as Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame have outpaced (AVT) with they have sent a strong wake-up call with their autonomic self-configuring, self-navigating and their predictive intelligence. For two decades AVT did not offer a true innovative solution that could match the accelerating sophistication of cyber terrorism. Cyber Terrorism is the beast that can destroy our critical infrastructures, threatens our economy and can disrupt our societal welfare. Our critical infrastructures are openly vulnerable and AVT was not designed to handle large scale defense, nor was it designed to provide a holistic shield against cyber terrorism. Another big hole is the Analog/Digital control systems such as SCADA. The objective of CEWPS™/Smart Vaccine is to fill the gap and provide an integrated security shield to match the potency of cyber terrorism. Graph-B shows the leading position of CEWPS™/Smart Vaccine Malware technology and AVT state-of-the-health. With such advanced concepts, it behooves the government and the private sector to review the state of the current technology and transition their defensive strategy to include early warning predictive system and digital immunity. We need to remember that OEM operation systems had very basic innate immunity like humans are born with it. No system has been designed with adaptive immunity that comes with vaccination and has the capability to recognize the attack and remember it. |
The CEWPS™/Smart Vaccine™ is also designed to use “Defense by Offense” mechanism before the virus contaminates other computers or even mutate to another object. When an attacking virus penetrates a computer through email, or Microsoft Internet Explorer, CEWPS™/Smart Vaccine™ will quickly recognize the foreign virus, neutralize and quarantine it. CEWPS™ will issue an early warning to the other systems on the grid. The Smart Vaccine will intercept the roaming worm and inoculate the other critical systems with the proper vaccine (code). The Virus Knowledge Base will store the attack episode for future references. All systems will be up without any interruption.
Graph- D illustrates the magic work of the Smart Vaccine™ within the CEWPS™ environment.
Business-centric Drivers
There are two significant drivers that justify the rapid adoption of the CEWPS™/Smart Vaccine. The first driver is to offer a cognitive early warning system to all critical infrastructures and mission critical systems in the country. The escalating cyber terrorism initiated from hostile countries to the United States is a major threat to our economic societal prosperities. For example, an Electronic Pearl Harbor attack on a metropolitan power grid could create havoc in several major cities with astronomical financial losses.
The second driver is that the state-of-the-art of Anti-Virus Technology (AVT) is still behind the technology curve, as shown previously in Graph-B. None of the AVT is fully autonomic, grid- centric, or artificially intelligent to reason and predict an attack.
CEWPS™/SV addresses the gaps in today technology by offering a holistic predictive approach to protect mission critical infrastructure.
Proposed Solution Framework
CEWPS™/Smart Vaccine™ is engineered, after the human body, with loosely coupled grids that provide virtualization and communication among the grids with one another at highly intelligent semantic level. The objective is to achieve high level of concurrency and parallel reliability as shown in Graph - E. If one layer goes down, the other layers keep performing until the system fixes itself and the three grids resume normal operation.
Top Layer: The Early warning and Malware Collecting Grid: It has the cognitive intelligence to detect, quarantine all incoming stealth attacks, recognize their origin, identify their structure and payload, and dispatch alert messages to the Smart Vaccine and Critical Systems grids. The Early Warning grid is the Radar of CEWPS™. It is made of honeypots, booby-traps, reasoning engines, and detection semantic knowledge engines. Furthermore, the grid acts as a parasympathetic neural network to manage all normal situations. The grid has its Central Command Center (CCC) with multiple dashboards to generate Business Intelligence real-time readings. However, It will instantly mutate into a sympathetic neural network when an attack is detected, and trigger an army of agents (like the Human B-cells) to track the virus and immobilize it. This is a part of its Resilient Management characteristics.
Middle Layer: The Smart Vaccine Factory Grid: is the main grid of CEWPS. Its main function is to build “acquired immunity” and immunological memory of attack episodes in the critical systems.
The Smart Vaccine is more than the sum of its parts — it is the intersection of three versatile technologies (Grid, Autonomic and On-Demand Computing). It exchanges info with Combat Command Center (3C). t is the kernel of the CEWPS™. The Smart Vaccine™ incrementally learns from its own vaccination episodes during the marshaling process. Graph-F shows the autonomic anatomy of the Smart Vaccine™.
Bottom Layer: The Critical Infrastructure Systems Grid: It connects all the critical systems of the infrastructure with the most sophisticated cloud middleware Graph F-a to deliver the necessary immuniware services. The Smart Vaccine™ Grid and the Critical System Grid are pathologically connected with neuron-like wide-band real-time connections, to achieve the most critical operation of the CEWPS™ during a severe surprise. The following services are performed autonomically:
Alert management
Vaccine Delivery management
Vaccination Registration and Management
Emergency Response
Information Collection Management
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Damage Control and management
