Soon your computer could be crawling with ants. Not the kind that show up in the cracks in your driveway, but little digital pieces of code that crawl your network and may someday replace that cumbersome anti-virus program. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, and Wake Forest University, North Carolina have developed a concept they call “swarm intelligence.” The concept is that these digital ants will crawl through a network looking for worms and other malware and attack it before it can infect the network.

“Our idea is to deploy 3,000 different types of digital ants, each looking for evidence of a threat,” explained Errin Fulp, researcher at Wake Forrest. “As they move about the network, they leave digital trails modeled after the scent trails ants in nature use to guide other ants. Each time a digital ant identifies some evidence, it is programmed to leave behind a stronger scent. Stronger scent trails attract more ants, producing the swarm that marks a potential computer infection.”

The digital ants offer several advantages over traditional “static” anti-virus programs. Digital ants move throughout the network looking for threats instead of waiting for the intruding malware to come to them. This does away with those annoying scans that rob resources and slow productivity. Further, digital ants learn and adapt to malicious code variants. There is no need to continually update, unlike today’s anti-virus.
Could digital ants be the answer to the PC owners anti-virus prayers? It is to early to tell, but the concept definitly holds promise.

Steve Marks