“[Stanford] Biology Professor Deborah M. Gordon presents a model suggesting that the human immune system and ants use similar distributed defense strategies to fight off intruders. Adapting this technique could yield stronger email spam filters.
The work suggests that evolution has twice produced a simple security protocol for social insects that, installed in email servers, could make them far more difficult for spammers to hack.
To kill spam, email filters might need to act a bit more like ants.
“No one ant knows every foreigner, but because each ant knows a few foreigners, the whole colony knows how to keep foreigners out most of time,” Gordon said. “It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot cheaper.”
Ants are an excellent system for studying distributed decision networks, Gordon said. It is fairly easy to manipulate the identifying chemical markers on their bodies– and thus influence their interactions – and to then track their resulting behavior changes.
Source: news.stanford.edu