Architecture for an Artificial Immune System

An artificial immune system (ARTIS) is described which incorporates many properties of natural immune systems, including diversity, distributed computation, error tolerance, dynamic learning and adaptation and self-monitoring. ARTIS is a general framework for a distributed adaptive system and could, in principle, be applied to many domains. In this paper, ARTIS is applied to computer security, in the form of a network intrusion detection system called LISYS. LISYS is described and shown to be effective at detecting intrusions, while maintaining low false positive rates. Finally, similarities and differences between ARTIS and Holland's classifier systems are discussed. 1 INTRODUCTION The biological immune system (IS) is highly complicated and appears to be precisely tuned to the problem of detecting and eliminating infections. We believe that the IS provides a compelling example of a massively-parallel adaptive information-processing system, one which we can study for the purpo..