Computer Immunology is a mind-blowing (if elderly) white paper on how computers can protect themselves from virii and other malware.
With the rise of worms like Nimda and CodeRed — I was basically offline for a week in Toronto because Nimda did such a number on the routers at TorEx, the main interchange for all of Toronto — and theoretical superworms like the Warhol Worm and the Flash Worm, ideas like this need to be reexamined.
I'm especially worried about worms in the context of P2P networks and Web services, which create persistent addresses for machines that are only occassionally online (viz. Passport, Napster, AIM), use proxies to route to computers that have nonroutable, private IPs (viz Napster, Morpheus, .NET firewall protocol), and run common services on multiple platforms. Superworms depend on tables of all vulnerable computers, and the combination of directory services, routability and common services seems ideally suited ot superworm deployment. Scary.
Imagine what the world would be like if humans were as helpless as computer systems. Doctors would be paged every time a person felt unwell or had to do something as basic as purge their waste `files'. They would then have to summon the person concerned in order to perform the necessary dialysis procedures and push pills into their mouths manually. Fortunately most humans have self-correcting systems which work both proactively and retroactively to prevent such a situation from arising. Not so computers: it is as though all of our machines are permanently in hospital.
