A Biologically Inspired Framework for Mitigating Epidemic and Pandemic Attacks in the NGMN

This paper proposes a security control framework for mitigating epidemic and pandemic network attacks in Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) by adopting several interesting principles from the human immune system (HIS) and the field of epidemiology. In particular, the proposed framework incorporates two key components: namely, the attack localization process and the attack recovery process. While the former administers the autonomous attack mitigation process and the security updates procedure, the latter accommodates a last line of defense (in the form of quarantine and rate limiting) for preventing repeated attacks on the NGMN. Performance evaluation indicates that the proposed security control framework is efficient in restricting both epidemic and pandemic attacks, and effective in alleviating the impact of the attacks on the network, thereby enhancing the survivability of the NGMN.