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IMAGE COURTESY OF THOMAS SMITH AND TIMOTHY BAKER AT PURDUE UNIVERSITY plex set of events takes place, usually resulting in elimination of the antigen by scavenger cells called macrophages.(How antigen is bound and cleared depends on the type of detectors involved.) Figure 1 outlines this highly simplified view of the immune system. A striking feature of the immune system is that the processes by which it generates detectors, identifies and eliminates foreign material, and remembers the patterns of previous infections are all highly parallel and distributed. This is one reason immune system mechanisms are so complicated, but it also makes them highly robust against failure of individual components and to attacks on the immune system itself. The analogy between computer security problems and biological processes was recognized as early as 1987, when the term “computer virus’’was …