BITSI

The primary research work I have been involved in during 2007 and into 2008 is BITSI, the Biologically-Inspired Tactical Security Infrastructure. The work with BITSI has been carried out in collaboration with Dr. Marco Carvalho's group at IHMC, and under sponsorship of the Army Research Laboratory via Cooperative Agreement No. W911NF-07-2-0022, CFDA No. 12.630.

The problem space BITSI seeks to address is protection of the electronic assets in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). In these environments, there is little of no fixed infrastructure, and so machines (nodes) collaborate to route traffic and provide service to one another. Furthermore, such nodes are often isolated, and have no way to request assistance from a centralized security oracle. As such, they must adapt to a changing security threat space autonomously, protecting the mission without requiring external management.

The basic ideas used by BITSI are a Danger-theory inspired Artificial Immune system, trust-based reputation exchange, and distributed group learning. Essentially, individual nodes detect violation of security policies (either prohibitions or obligations). This damage causes the system to examine recent transactions and infer which data flow is causing the damage. Using this information, the security stance is automatically adjusted to attempt to limit further damage. This information is shared with peers, which balance this input with past history, sending node configuration and the trust assigned to that particular node. Finally, the system can adopt a group response in order to limit damage globally, and ensure mission continuity.

BITSI is a large and complex project, and as such it doesn't make sense to replicate too much information here. Instead, please visit our project website.

Selected Publications

Carvalho M., Ford R., Allen W.H., and Marin G., Securing MANETs with BITSI: Danger Theory and Mission Continuity, SPIE Defense and Security Conference, Orlando, 17-20 March 2008

Ford R., Carvalho M., Allen W., BITSI: A Biologically-Inspired Adaptive Defense Framework, Adaptive and Resilient Computer Security Workshop, Santa Fe Institute, 2007