Complexity-theoretic Modeling of Biological Cyanide Poisoning as Security Attack in Self-organizing Networks

We draw an analogy of biological cyanide poisoning to security attacks in self-organizing mobile ad hoc networks. When a circulatory system is treated as an enclosed network space, a hemoglobin is treated as a mobile node, and a hemoglobin binding with cyanide ion is treated as a compromised node (which cannot bind with oxygen to furnish its oxygen-transport function), we show how cyanide poisoning can reduce the probability of oxygen/message delivery to a "negligible" quantity. Like modern cryptography, security problem in our network-centric model is defined on the complexity-theoretic concept of "negligible", which is asymptotically sub-polynomial with respect to a pre-defined system parameter x. Intuitively, the parameter x is the key length n in modern cryptography, but is changed to the network scale, or the number of network nodes N, in our model. Based on this new analytic model, we show that TIP (n-runs) complexity class with a virtual oracle can formally model the cyanide poisoning phenomenon and similar network threats. This new analytic approach leads to a new view of biological threats from the perspective of network security and complexity theoretic study.