Clarksville, TN – Over the last several years, Dr. Yingbing Yu, assistant professor of computer science at Austin Peay State University, has developed an interest in the biomedical science of immunology. Specifically, he’s been curious about how natural immune systems identify and protect an organism from harmful foreign bodies, such as bacteria or parasites. Could a similar computer immunology model be developed to detect viruses in computers?
Yu’s subsequent research found that such a model could successfully detect serious invasions of computer systems with a low false-alarm rate. He recently published his findings in a computer security paper titled “Anomaly Intrusion Detection Based Upon an Artificial Immunity Model.”
“In a computer system, self is defined as normal behavior patterns in the past, and non-self might be a masquerader, a foreign code in the form of a virus, worm or Trojan horse,” Yu said. “We introduced new methods to build the behavior profile for privileged processes of operating systems. New data was compared with that profile to determine the self and non-self value and thus the potential threat level.”
Yu’s research, which could have major implications on computer intrusion detection systems, recently won the “Best Paper” award at the 49th Annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Southeast Conference in Kennesaw, GA. This is the longest, continuously running computer-science conference in the country.
For more information on Yu or his paper, contact the APSU Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at 931-221-7840.
