Exploring the applicability of membrane computing to network security

Investigating the existing approaches of tackling various network security challenges can never be totally exhausted because a perfect and completely secured system is yet unborn! Hence by so doing, their weaknesses would be highlighted with a view to introducing other methods which offer better and more efficient benefits. Membrane computing (MC) is a versatile, non-deterministic and maximally parallel computing device which was inspired by the functioning of living biological cells. The aim of this article therefore is to take a deeper look at concepts within Network security systems (NSS) and especially that of membrane system. Furthermore, based on the inherent benefits of MC and areas where it has been applied successfully, we (i) project a link between it and NSS and (ii) propose MC as an alternative veritable tool towards solving some of the problems of NSS such as packet dropping in Intrusion Detection System (IDS) which usually emanates from systems' inability to handle large traffic data. This was experimented using a model built on recognizer Tissue P system on GPU and the initial results obtained show that our method yields better detection speedup.