DIDA:A Dynamic Immunity-based Defense Approach for Advanced Persistent Threats

The newest threat to cybersecurity has been categorized as the Advanced Persistent Threat or APT. The APT is a type of elaborate, multi-step targeted attacks aimed at infiltrating a specific network, such as governmental institutions or companies. APTs present a challenge for organizational cyber security efforts. Inspired by the human immune system, we present a novel dynamic immunity-based defense approach for APTs (DIDA). The definitions in DIDA such as self, nonself, antigen, antigen presenting cell, immune cell and danger signal concentration are given. We use the danger signal concentration to calculate the danger of antigens and mimic the dynamic evolution processes of antigen presenting cells, immune cells, and antigen gene pool in the presented DIDA. The theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the DIDA effectively overcomes the quantitative calculation problem of antigen concentration, and therefore has better adaptability to the defense of APTs than traditional methods.