hackfix-virusnews: What's Good About Computer Viruses
- From: "Christy" <snowz@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: hackfix-virusnews@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 06 Mar 2004 04:20:22 -0500
What's Good About Computer Viruses
By Diane Stresing
www.TechNewsWorld.com,
Part of the ECT News Network
March 5, 2004
"The Internet is a totally connected infrastructure,"
said Steve Trilling, senior director of research at
Symantec. "That means we're only as strong as the
weakest link." If every computer user simply
protected his or her own laptop or PC, Trilling said,
virus and worm writers would have to pursue another
form of entertainment.
Ahhh-choo! Ahh, lucky you. Every time you are exposed
to a virus, your immune system builds resistance to
that particular bug. So, why can't we build computers
that do the same thing? "If our bodies functioned
like computers, we'd be extinct," said Steve Hofmeyr,
founder and chief scientist of Sana Security. "The
body is a dynamic place that profits from changes,"
he told TechNewsWorld. "Our immune systems adapt with
us from birth to puberty and through the aging
process."
Perhaps the promise of biological computing is that
our machines will grow up, rather than grow obsolete.
But while it's easy to draw analogies between how the
human immune system works and how virus protection
software programs should work, mimicking nature is no
simple task.
Designing Survivability
According to David Evans, professor of computer
science at the University of Virginia, we may not be
able to develop computer programs that mimic biology
exactly, but we can learn techniques from biology
that enable us to build more scalable and robust
systems. Several of Evans' projects are supported by
National Science Foundation (NSF) grants.
"Our goal is to produce complex, predictable behavior
from a large number of unreliable components," he
said. Someday, Evans added, our computers could
manage to remain up and running even as new viruses
spread, "...the same way an organism survives even
when its cells fail and its environment changes."
Read more here:
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/33045.html
=A9 1998-2004 ECT News Network, Inc.
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