Tactical Immune System (TIS) based on Dynamically Assigned Sense of Self

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) poses a serious threat to all mission critical systems and networks. No onewhether government, business, or individualis exempt from the ravages of malicious cyber acts (e.g., APT) upon imperfect technologies. While existing cyber defenses (e.g., firewall, authentication, IDS/IPS, antivirus) are very helpful, they fail to address the real cause of all APTsthe security vulnerabilities in the software running in the mission critical systems. APT cannot be effectively repelled or eliminated until the security vulnerabilities in the software are effectively addressed.Inspired by the self-nonself discrimination in our natural immune system, the PI has explored a new direction in building effective and efficient artificial malware immunization against all control flow hijacking attacks.We propose to develop the first practical tactical immune system (TIS) that will provide unprecedented real-time protection for the identified enterprise and tactical servers, clients, platforms, networks. Our dynamically assigned sense of self eliminates training and re-alignment needed by other models of self and enables us to effectively and efficiently detect and block the first nonself system call of any control flow hijacking attack in true real-time with no false positive.