Hive oversight for network intrusion early warning using DIAMoND: a bee-inspired method for fully distributed cyber defense

Social insect colonies have survived over evolutionary time in part due to the success of their collaborative methods: using local information and distributed decision making algorithms to detect and exploit critical resources in their environment. These methods have the unusual and useful ability to detect anomalies rapidly, with very little memory, and using only very local information. Our research investigates the potential for a self-organizing anomaly detection system inspired by those observed naturally in colonies of honey bees. We provide a summary of findings from a recently presented algorithm for a nonparametric, fully distributed coordination framework that translates the biological success of these methods into analogous operations for use in cyber defense and discuss the features that inspired this translation. We explore the impacts on detection performance of the defined range of distributed communication for each node and of involving only a small percentage of total nodes in the network in the distributed detection communication. We evaluate our algorithm using a software-based testing implementation, and demonstrate up to 20 percent improvement in detection capability over parallel isolated anomaly detectors.