Trends towards Bio-Inspired Security Countermeasures for Cloud Environments

Security challenges in cloud environments remain largely catastrophic due to the nature of the cloud; complex, heterogeneous, widely accessible over the internet, and virtualised resource sharing. Static and boundary-based conventional security approaches are clearly not effective as the sole countermeasures. Instead, countermeasures need to be intelligent with a high degree of autonomous, self-managing and self-organised, and highly adaptive to cope with dynamism of the cloud, and an emerging and sophisticated threat domain. Though not extensively used in cloud security countermeasures, nature is abounding with complex patterns emanating from interactions among autonomous agents. Its continuous coordination and information sharing enables self-organisation, whereby changes in forms of order occur without a central point of control. Nature's multifaceted superiority enables biological systems to adapt and survive through awareness, adaptation, learning and evolution. The concepts described nature's inherently multifunctional capabilities such as robustness, sophistication, and adaptability. This paper identifies common trends towards bio-inspired approaches for cloud security challenges. Its surveys the use of bio-inspired approaches in computing; cloud and non-cloud, and evaluates their strengths and weaknesses.